Leo Buscaglia Quotes

To be is to do - Socrates To do is to be - Sartre Do Be Do Be Do - Sinatra

The two basic topics which fascinate me are 'What is reality?' and 'What constitutes the authentic human being?'

All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.

We never know we are beings till we love. And then it is we know the powers and potentialities of human existence.

Man exists, turns up, appears on the scene and only afterwards, defines himself

I take on a shape and an existence only if I first throw myself into the world by loving, by doing.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Do not let it be your aim to be something, but to be someone.

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.

Like Leibniz's possible worlds, most men are only equally entitled pretenders to existence. There are few existences.

The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.

Life is a state of consciousness.

How could there be any question of acquiring or possessing, when the one thing needful for a man is to become - to be at last, and to die in the fullness of his being.

You are.

Never think you can separate who you are from what you're doing.

Logotherapy sees the human patient in all his humanness. I step up to the core of the patient's being. And that is a being in search of meaning, a being that is transcending himself, a being capable of acting in love for others.

If you are not something, how do you become it? It is not obvious to me that you can be something you are not.

Existence as entirety remains beyond any one meaning and it is the conscious presence of humanness in the world inasmuch as this is nonmeaning, having nothing to do other than be what it is, no longer able to go beyond itself or give itself some kind of meaning through action.

There is no fixed, true and real person inside of you or me, precisely because being a person necessarily implies becoming a person, being in process.

Society? Can we trust us? Doubt it. We're probably not even real, as was revealed in the popular documentary The Matrix. That bloke next door? Made of pixels. Your co-workers? Pixels. You? One pixel. One measly pixel. You haven't even got shoes, for Christ's sake.

Your duty is to Be, and not to be this or that.

Understanding of being is itself a determination of being of Da-sein.

You is what you am, a cow don't make ham.

I have no designs on society, or nature, or God. I am simply what I am, or I begin to be that. I live in the present. I only remember the past, and anticipate the future. I love to live.