“People are not evil; they are schlemiels.”

Most people experience both tragedy and joy in varying proportions. Any philosophy which leaves out either cannot be considered to be comprehensive.

False optimism sooner or later means disillusionment, anger and hopelessness.

The most stable, and therefore, the most healthy self-esteem is based on deserved respect from others rather than on external fame or celebrity and unwarranted adulation.

One of the goals of education should be to teach that life is precious.

Every person is, in part, his own project and makes himself.

Obviously the most beautiful fate, the most wonderful good fortune that can happen to any human being, is to be paid for doing that which he passionately loves to do.

It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually.

One’s only rival is one’s own potentialities. One’s only failure is failing to live up to one’s own possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king.

The needs for safety, belonging, love relations and for respect can be satisfied only by other people, i.e. only from outside the person.

All of life is education and everybody is a teacher and everybody is forever a pupil.

We must understand love; we must be able to teach it, to create it, to predict it, or else the world is lost to hostility and to suspicion.

We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle that anybody created anything.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.

What is life for? Life is for you.

Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth). Make the growth choice a dozen times a day.

The definition of the good society is one in which virtue pays.