Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have , so to speak , pawned a part of their narcissism.
The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.
Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.
My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.
No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.
The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.
We believe that it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world, by means of which we can increase out power and in accordance with which we can arrange our life. If this belief is an illusion, then we are in the same position as you. But science has given us evidence by its numerous and important successes that it is no illusion.
Perhaps the hopes I have confessed to are of an illusory nature, too. But I hold fast to one distinction. Apart from the fact that no penalty is imposed for not sharing them, my illusions are not, like religious ones, incapable of correction.
Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.
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.
The view is often defended that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basal concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them.
It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.