Erotic love begins with separateness, and ends in oneness. Motherly love begins with oneness, and leads to separateness.

Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.

Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self.

There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.

There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers, by living productively.

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.

In the first World War British propaganda had to invent the stories of German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies, because there were too few real atrocities to feed the hatred against the enemy.

The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.

The criterion of mental health is not one of individual adjustment to a given social order, but a universal one, valid for all men, of giving a satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.

Man can be defined as the animal that can say "I," that can be aware of himself as a separate entity.