Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
we are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our body, which is doomed to decay..., from the external world which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless force of destruction, and finally from our relations with other men....
I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind.
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct....
It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.
Homo homini lupus [man is wolf to man]. Who in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?
My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.
We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.
In this way the ego detaches itself from the external world. It is more correct to say: Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a...
I can imagine that the oceanic feeling could become connected with religion later on. That feeling of oneness with the universe which is its ideational content sounds very like a first attempt at the consolations of religion, like another way taken b...
When a love-relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves
