Philip Rieff Quotes & Sayings

Scholarship is polite argument. — Philip Rieff

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

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

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

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

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

The truth is, Jung has brought back one member of the old duality, unreason, with a new name; it is no synthesis at all, but only the latest maneuver in the war against rationality that has been conducted with rising hysteria by literary intellectuals and humanists against the laws of a culture they have reason to distrust and disobey. The Jungian theory proposes to every disaffected humanist his "personal myth," as a sanctuary against the modern world. Against the vulgar democracy of intelligence, Jungian theory proposes an aristocracy of feeling. From this proposal derives Jung's persistent influence on modern critical and aesthetic style. — Philip Rieff