Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total… Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself.

Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself.

Man does not only sell commodities, he sells himself and feels himself to be a commodity.

Only in being productively active can man make sense of his life.

Only when man succeeds in developing his reason and love further than he has done so far, only when he can build a world based on human solidarity and justice, only when he can feel rooted in the experience of universal brotherliness, will he have tr

Even if man's hunger and thirst and his sexual strivings are completely satisfied, 'he' is not satisfied. In contrast to the animal his most compelling problems are not solved then, they only begin. He strives for power or for love, or for destruction, he risks his life for religious, for political, for humanistic ideals, and these strivings are what constitutes and characterizes the peculiarity of human life.

There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

The existential split in man would be unbearable could he not establish a sense of unity within himself and with the natural and human world outside.