Pitirim A. Sorokin Quotes

Every morning is a battle between the superego and the id, and I am a mere foot soldier with mud and a snooze button on her shield.

What exactly is it that humans do that is specifically human? There has to be something. How odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people.

Everything depends therefore on encountering thought at its source. Such thought is the reality of man's being, which achieved consciousness and understanding of itself through it.

Even though Da Vinci was a genius, it's important to remember he was just a man.

Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human.

Human beings are infinitely worth studying, especially the peculiarities that often go along with outstanding gifts.

It is what makes us human, what distinguishes us from other animals. We can be aware of being aware.

Consciousness permits us to develop the instruments of culture - morality and justice, religion, art, economics and politics, science and technology. Those instruments allow us some measure of freedom in the confrontation with nature.

Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes.

The golden hour of invention must terminate like other hours, and when the man of genius returns to the cares, the duties, the vexations, and the amusements of life, his companions behold him as one of themselves - the creature of habits and infirmities.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.

Genius, particularly creative genius, is less about raw intelligence and more about elevated vision.

The conventional mind is passive - it consumes information and regurgitates it in familiar forms. The dimensional mind is active, transforming everything it digests into something new and original, creating instead of consuming.

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.

I think that our personalities and our souls have so much - we're so much more than just blood vessels and bone and muscle.

While doing 'Ghazi,' Sankalp said he wanted me for his next film. He is a genius. There is always a mini-war going on in his brain, though he is a reticent person.

We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness.

Then you have a big problem, because a human is a thinking animal. If you don't think, you're not really a human.

Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative - that we're just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different - that this is human destiny, this is human nature.

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive.

Let us leave to the brain what belongs to it, and agree that the work of the men of genius is of the superhuman, the offspring of man.

genius is original, unique; and in whatever form it may develop itself is the greatest gift that can be given to man, the strongest known link between the material life we have and the spiritual life that we can only guess at. Every great poet, painter, or musician - every inventor or man of science, every fine actor or orator, comes to us as the exponent of something diviner than we know. We cannot understand it, but we feel it, and acknowledge it.

First, then, I say, that the mind, which we often call the intellect, in which is placed the conduct and government of life, is not less an integral part of man himself, than the hand, and foot, and eyes, are portions of the whole animal.

There is no so wretched and coarse a soul wherein some particular faculty is not seen to shine.

No truly conscious human being sabotages himself - it's impossible, because it's contrary to Nature.