Love isn't something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn't a feeling, it is a practice.

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The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.

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Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.

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Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.

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The deepest need of the human being is to overcome our separateness, to leave the prison of our loneliness.

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Power on the one side, fear on the other, are always the buttresses on which irrational authority is built

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If other people do not understand our behavior-so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being 'asocial' or 'irrational' in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and our courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them.

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The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.

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The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane

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The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one's narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one's desires and fears

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