"This particular animal, the human, is the most complex and needs the longest length of protection before it is able to manage on its own."

"Pour ces êtres atteints d’ « insécurité ontologique », il faut tâcher de puiser en soi-même le moyen d’être authentiquement."

"I don't know how to explain who I am or why I am writing to you except to say that I have just read your book, On Becoming a Person, ..."

"I would no longer be terming it a "state of empathy," because I believe it to be a process, rather than a state."

"To me it is meaningful to say that the substratum of all motivation is the organismic tendency toward fulfillment."

People with a soulful psychological temperament are receptive, reflective, often deliberate and slow.

"Dans cet éternel observateur de soi-même, je me retrouve avec tous mes défauts : inconstance, indécision, découragement, inachèvement."

"My own sensibility reacts but little externally. It is occupied either by confused inward impressions, or by the ideas which strike me."

"Il n'est pas difficile de prouver que l'attention et la réflexion sont des facultés vraiment morales."

"M. de Biran fut un observateur de soi-même comme il n’en existe qu’un bien petit nombre."

"The archdemon of egoism leads us along the royal road to that ingathering which religious experience demands."

Animals are happy so long as they have health and enough to eat. Human beings, one feels, ought to be, but in the modern world they are not.

Interview 1957 / Face to face, 1959 / Des idées, des hommes, des oeuvres, 1987

"However dreames may bee fallacious concerning outward events, yet may they bee truly significant at home..."

"As Otto Rank remarked, the neurotic is the “artiste manqué,” the artist who cannot transmute his conflicts into art."

"The condition of alienation, of being asleep, .. is the condition of the normal man. "

"Les méditatifs-émotionnels ont pour marque propre une sensibilité exquise, délicate, unie à une intelligence fine, souple et pénétrante."

"L’homme moderne s’enivre de dissipation. Abus de vitesse, abus de lumière, abus de toniques, de stupéfiants, d’excitants…"

"Don Quixote, in Cervantes' novel, is a typical example of the victim of triangular desire, but he is far from being the only one."

"L’ironie est la fille passionnée de la Douleur ; mais elle est aussi la fille altière de la froide intelligence."

"Foremost among the satisfactions we owe to the imagination is the enjoyment of works of art."

"The achievement of personality means nothing less than the optimum development of the whole individual human being."

"La vie est un champ de bataille. Elle l’a toujours été et le restera toujours."

"It is a notorious fact that the morality of society as a whole is in inverse ratio to its size."