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

Self-confidence is inseparable from submission to the creedal order, and through that order, to the supreme authority expressed in that order. ... De…

- Philip Rieff

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

Intellection must address the matter of its feeling.

- Philip Rieff

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

- Philip Rieff

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 ec…

- Philip Rieff

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

- Philip Rieff

Scholarship is polite argument.

- Philip Rieff

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

- Philip Rieff