We are no longer limited by ignorance and lack of purpose; but our ignorance is still enormous. The road we have to travel still stretches into the distance. It is impossible for me to explain the nature of the problems that confront us. If human beings were capable of understanding, there would be no need to explain.
And in two centuries, human history became a parable of the weakness of human beings, the indifference of nature, the helplessness of man confronting Necessity.
I have a feeling that there are powerful forces working on the side of humanity, although I have no idea of their nature.
Yet so enormous is man's optimism and power of self-renewal that the chaos only stimulates him to new efforts.
A single traumatic experience in childhood could be the foundation for a lifelong neurosis. One or two happy experiences in early childhood can make a man an optimist for life.
As an unashamed 'romantic', I have always been subject to boredom. This boredom arises out of a kind of mistrust of the world. You feel you can't ignore it, can't take your eyes off it and forget it.
To see him working on a digging was to see a man who had ceased to exist in the twentieth century, and who looked down on history like a golden eagle from some mountain peak.
A sane man is a man who is fully awake. As he grows tired, he loses his ability to rise above dreams and delusions, and life becomes steadily more chaotic.
Man is an animal who is trying to evolve into a god.
The new man has lost faith in life, he has lost faith in knowledge.
I was like some diver at the bottom of the sea, so absorbed in contemplating the treasure of a sunken ship that I failed to notice the cold eyes of the octopus that lay in wait behind me.
Once man has a purpose and a belief, he is almost invincible.
And when man realizes that his mind is a kingdom in the most literal sense, a great unexplored country, he has crossed the borderline that divides the animal from the god.
The mind is the most private place in the universe sometimes, perhaps, too private.
For Reich, science contained all the poetry of life, and the past merely happened to be the field in which he exercised his ability. As to myself, science was a servant of poetry.
Nothing is more obvious than that man is a god who will overcome every obstacle.
The 'inhabitants' of the mind are memories and ideas, not monsters.
An immense pessimism descends on the human race, which is reflected in its art, its music, its literature.
Man is lazy by nature, and laziness is by no means to be condemned. It means he dislikes inconvenience, and he has created civilization to escape inconvenience; so his laziness has been an important factor in his evolution. But this also means that he prefers to evolve at his own slow and deliberate rate.
A tired man is a man already in the grip of death and insanity.
In fact, modern history begins, the age of defeat and neurosis.
The new man has lost faith in life, he has lost faith in knowledge. Modern man agrees with Faust: that when all is said and done, we can know nothing.
The sheer size of the task overawed us. Yet it did not depress us. No scientist could be depressed at the prospect of endless discovery.