If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature.

To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.

The fact is that the culture does not have only positive effects on our intellectual and moral functions but also negative effects.

The most important misunderstanding seems to me to lie in a confusion between the human necessities which I consider part of human nature, and the human necessities as they appear as drives, needs, passions, etc., in any given historical period.

Sleep is often the only occasion in which man cannot silence his conscience; we forget what we knew in our dream.

The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety.

The most important factor for the development of the individual is the structure and the values of the society into which he was born.