I am convinced that boredom is one of the greatest tortures. If I were to imagine Hell, it would be the place where you were continually bored.

Love isn't something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn't a feeling, it is a practice.

[Sigmund ] Freud did not under-stand that the dream is a highly creative act, written in the universal language of symbolism, and only secondarily does censorship distort those parts that the subject refuses to accept even in sleep.

I think what democracy means today, in reality, is to a large extent, manipulated consent - not forced consent, manipulated consent - and manipulated more and more with the help of Madison Avenue.

Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.

Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Love is not a spontaneous feeling, a thing that you fall into, but is something that requires thought, knowledge, care, giving, and respect. And it is something that is rare and difficult to find in capitalism, which commodifies human activity.

We are not on the way to greater individualism, but are becoming an increasingly manipulated mass civilization.