Wilhelm Reich Quotes

She is Living and I'm Dead, but I'd like to believe we're both human. Call me an idealist.

Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer.

I believe the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.

Man is not by any means of fixed and enduring form (this, in spite of suspicions to the contrary on the part of their wise men, was the ideal of the ancients). He is nothing else than the narrow and perilous bridge between nature and spirit. His innermost destiny drives him on to the spirit and to God. His innermost longing draws him back to nature, the mother. Between the two forces his life hangs tremulous and irresolute.

We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.

Odd how clear it suddenly became, once a person had died, that the body was the very least of him.

We have imagined ourselves a special creation, set apart from other humans. In the last twentieth century, we see that our povertyis as absolute as that of the poorest nations. We have attempted to deny the human condition in our quest for power after power. It would be well for us to rejoin the human race, to accept our essential poverty as a gift, and to share our material wealth with those in need.

Human, all too human.

Death is part of who we are. It guides us. It shapes us. It drives us to madness. Can you still be human if you have no mortal end

All men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away.

To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.

Part of knowing who we are is knowing we are not someone else. And Jew is only the name we give to that stranger, the agony we cannot feel, the death we look at like a cold abstraction. Each man has his Jew; it is the other.

What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?

Life is a problem; mortal man was made to solve the solemn problem right or wrong.

I am human, all too bloody human.

I think we all try to figure out ways to ignore the fact that life is about suffering. In the modern world, that's what we're surrounded with. We have all these little tools, such as phones and the Internet, to help us forget about suffering. Whenever you are tired, you don't have to really sit in the abyss of what it means to be alive. We always find ways to avoid it. When a ship sinks, you are sitting in it. There is no way to avoid.

I have learned what must be, and therefore have come to see the whole horror of what is.

Nobody asked you about being born, nobody is going to ask you when the time comes for you to be taken away. Then why be worried? Birth happened to you; death will happen to you; who are you to come in between?

It's not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me, it's mankind.

Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.

Humanity's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.

As long as a man thinks, this struggle must go on, and so long man must have some form of religion.

You have to be very deep to be dead, he thought, and I'm not. He began to have some concept of forever, and his mind shivered as his body had when he had wakened in the cold nights and thrust his hands between his thighs to keep warm. It will be a long night, he thought.

The salvation of the world is in man's suffering.