19 quotes
Freedom is man's capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.
Man’s Search for Himself (1953)
The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have.
Man’s Search for Himself (1953)
Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings.
Man’s Search for Himself (1953)
It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move on in one's inward journey into new realms, than to stand defiantly for outer freedom.
Man’s Search for Himself (1953)
The past has meaning as it lights up the present, and the future as it makes the present richer and more profound.
Man’s Search for Himself (1953)
Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears.
Man’s Search for Himself (1953)
We define religion as the assumption that life has meaning. Religion, or lack of it, is shown not in some intellectual or verbal formulations but in one's total orientation to life. Religion is whatever the individual takes to be his ultimate concern.
Man’s Search for Himself (1953)
The practical implicati´on is that one's goal is to live each moment with freedom, honesty and responsibility.
Man’s Search for Himself (1953)
Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration.
Man’s Search for Himself (1953)
The ancient Greeks, as Plato reports, believed that we discover truth through "reminiscence," that is by "remembering," by intuitively searching into our own experience.
Man’s Search for Himself (1953)
Vanity and narcissism — the compulsive need to be admired and praised — undermine one's courage, for one then fights on someone else's conviction rather than one's own.
Man’s Search for Himself (1953)
In any age courage is the simple virtue needed for a human being to traverse the rocky road from infancy to maturity of personality. But in an age of anxiety, an age of her morality and personal isolation, courage is a sine qua non.
Man’s Search for Himself (1953)
Freud was in error when he held that religion is per se a compulsion neurosis. Some religion is and some is not.
Man’s Search for Himself (1953)
Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men.
Man’s Search for Himself (1953)
Man is the "ethical animal" — ethical in potentiality even if, unfortunately, not in actuality. His capacity for ethical judgment — like freedom, reason and the other unique characteristics of the human being — is based upon his consciousness of himself.
Man’s Search for Himself (1953)
Along with the loss of the sense of self has gone a loss of our language for communicating deeply personal meanings to each other. This is one important side of the loneliness now experienced by people in the Western world.
Man’s Search for Himself (1953)
The human being cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if he is not growing toward something, he does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into destructive activities.
Man’s Search for Himself (1953)
It may sound surprising when I say, on the basis of my own clinical practice as well as that of my psychological and psychiatric colleagues, that the chief problem of people in the middle decade of the twentieth century is emptiness.
Man’s Search for Himself (1953)
In any discussion of religion and personality integration the question is not whether religion itself makes for health or neurosis, but what kind of religion and how is it used? Freud was in error when he held that religion is per se a compulsion neurosis. Some religion is and some is not.
Man’s Search for Himself (1953)