Philip Rieff Quotes

Intellection must address the matter of its feeling.

Scholarship is polite argument.

Reason cannot save us, nothing can; but reason can mitigate the cruelty of living.

Psychological man may be going nowhere, but he aims to achieve a certain speed and certainty in going. Like his predecessor, the man of the market economy, he understands morality as that which is conducive to increased activity. The important thing is to keep going.

Religious man was born to be saved, psychological man is born to be pleased.

Religion may have been the original cure; Freud reminds us that it was also the original disease.

Man is tied to the weight of his own past, and even by a great therapeutic labor little more can be accomplished than a shifting of the burden.

Beyond the wounds of the child and the scars of the man, there is something in the heart of love itself that makes love pathetic.