The mother's and father's attitudes toward the child correspond to the child's own needs.... Mother has the function of making himsecure in life, father has the function of teaching him, guiding him to cope with those problems with which the particular society the child has been born into confronts him.

Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.

The average American never loses his sleep about affairs which relate to his society and to our whole country.

If you take a salesman, who sells a useless commodity, he feels like a fraud.

The kind of relatedness to the world may be noble or trivial, but even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone.

To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness

What are the conditions of the creative attitude, of seeing and responding, of being aware and being sensitive to what one is aware of? First of all it requires the capacity to be puzzled. Children still have the capacity to be puzzled.