The aim of life is to be fully born, though its tragedy is that most of us die before we are thus born.

It is true that one has to think first and then to act - but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.

Thus, the ultimate choice for a man, inasmuch as he is driven to transcend himself, is to create or to destroy, to love or to hate.

Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.

The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one's narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one's desires and fears.

Many students of dreams, from Plato to [Sigmund] Freud, hold that the sleeping person,deprived of contact with the outside world, regresses temporarily to an irrational primitive mental state.

Politics and religious leaders [are hindered] by their egotism.