We are concerned with things. We are concerned with success. We are concerned with money. We are concerned with instrumentalities.

I would say that love today is a relatively rare phenomenon, that we have a great deal of sentimentality; we have a great deal of illusion about love, namely as a... as something one falls in.

Understanding a person does not mean condoning; it only means that one does not accuse him as if one were God or a judge placed above him.

The duty to be alive is the same as the duty to become oneself, to develop into the individual one potentially is.

The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.

Can freedom become a burden, too heavy for man to bear, something he tries to escape from?..Is there not also, perhaps, besides an innate desire for freedom, an instinctive wish for submission?

If one admits that the influence of the outside world is essentially beneficial, the lack of such influence during sleep would tend to diminish the value of our dream activity so as to render it inferior to the mental activity that takes place when we are awake, when we are exposed to these beneficial influences of surrounding reality. But how can one say that the influence of reality is exclusively beneficial. Could it not also be damaging, and could its absence not give access to qualities superior to those that we have when awake?