 The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity. |
| One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often. |
| Man always dies before he is fully born. |
| Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties. |
| The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have. |
| The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity. |
| There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers. |
| Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved. |
| In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two. |
| Authority is not a quality one person "has," in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him. |
| Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others. |
| The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent. |
| Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either. |
| If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. |
| Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies. |
| Sanity is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought. |
| The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers. |
| Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age? |
| Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture. |
| Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much. |
