Rieff Quotes

#1. Religious man was born to be saved, psychological man is born to be pleased.

Philip Rieff

#2. It is never too late or too early; you are never too young or too old. You can do what you can do.

Israelmore Ayivor

#3. The salat can be made up for, but there is no making up for false show or outward worship without presence.

Shams Tabrizi

#4. Habit had made the custom.

Ovid

#5. I'm not a biographer, I'm a novelist.

Barry Unsworth

#6. Scholarship is polite argument.

Philip Rieff

#7. Beyond the wounds of the child and the scars of the man, there is something in the heart of love itself that makes love pathetic.

Philip Rieff

#8. Man is tied to the weight of his own past, and even by a great therapeutic labor little more can be accomplished than a shifting of the burden.

Philip Rieff

#9. Those who dissolve their body of perception completely are absorbed into what we would call nirvana.

Frederick Lenz

#10. Perhaps we become accustomed to our grief and, as it becomes increasingly familiar, increasingly part of the emotional landscape, it becomes a dullness. But there is no closure, no forgetting. One mourns those one has loved who have died until one joins them. It happens soon enough.

David Rieff

#11. Intellection must address the matter of its feeling.

Philip Rieff

#12. Psychological man may be going nowhere, but he aims to achieve a certain speed and certainty in going. Like his predecessor, the man of the market economy, he understands morality as that which is conducive to increased activity. The important thing is to keep going.

Philip Rieff

#13. Reason cannot save us, nothing can; but reason can mitigate the cruelty of living.

Philip Rieff

#14. All major religious traditions accept that suffering and death are simply part of life. The deep radicalism of humanitarian action is its belief that people are not made to suffer.

David Rieff

#15. The country would be far better if the population were half as interested in keeping their minds in as good condition as they tried to keep their bodies.

John Saul

#16. Religion may have been the original cure; Freud reminds us that it was also the original disease.

Philip Rieff