Top 9 Quotes & Sayings by Philip Rieff

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American critic Philip Rieff.

Last updated on December 18, 2024.

Philip Rieff was an American sociologist and cultural critic, who taught sociology at the University of Pennsylvania from 1961 until 1992. He was the author of a number of books on Sigmund Freud and his legacy, including Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959) and The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (1966). He was married for eight years in the 1950s to Susan Sontag, during which their son, David Rieff—a writer and editor of his mother's personal journals—was born. His second wife and widow Alison Douglas Knox died December 12, 2011.

American - Critic | December 15, 1922 - July 1, 2006

Source: Wikipedia

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

Philip Rieff

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

Philip Rieff

Intellection must address the matter of its feeling.

Philip Rieff

Scholarship is polite argument.

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 economy, he understands morality as that which is conducive to increased activity. The important thing is to keep going.

Philip Rieff

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

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

Self-confidence is inseparable from submission to the creedal order, and through that order, to the supreme authority expressed in that order. ... Deep individualism cannot exist except in relation to the highest authority. No inner discipline can operate without a charismatic institution, nor can such an institution survive without that supreme authority from a relation to whom self-confidence derives. Without an authority deeply installed, there is no foundation for individuality. Self-confidence thus expresses submission to supreme authority.

Philip Rieff

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

Philip Rieff

Top 9 Quotes & Sayings by Philip Rieff

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