One cannot fall in love, really; one has to be in love.

If we love our fellow humans, we cannot limit our insight and our love only to others as individuals...We have to be political people, I would even say passionately involved political people, each of us in the way that best suits our own temperaments, our working lives, and our own capabilities.

Man can never stand still. He must find solutions to this contradiction, and ever better solutions to the extent to which reality enables him.

What is for me socialism is exactly the opposite of a bureaucratically-managed culture.

Intellectuals are hindered on the way to being, by their narcissism.

Man always dies before he is fully born.

If the meaning of life has become doubtful, if one's relations to others and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one means to silence one's doubts. It has a function to be compared with that of the Egyptian pyramids or the Christian faith in immortality: it elevates one's individual life from its limitations and instability to the plane of indestructability; if one's name is known to one's contemporaries and if one can hope that it will last for centuries, then one's life has meaning and significance by this very reflection of it in the judgments of others.