The difference between being and having is not essentially that between East and West. The difference is rather between a society centered around persons and one centered around things.

We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent—people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save.

most people find giving up their having orientation too difficult; any attempt to do so arouses their intense anxiety and feels like giving up all security, like being thrown into the ocean when one does not know how to swim.

It is interesting to note that in the development of many languages the construction “it is to me” is followed later on by the construction “I have,” but as Emile Benveniste has pointed out, the evolution does not occur in the reverse direction.

Ignorance, for the one who knows, is as good as knowledge, since both are part of the process of knowing, even though ignorance of this kind is different from the ignorance of the unthinking. Optimum knowledge in the being mode is to know more deeply. In the having mode it is to have more knowledge.

The deepest yearning of human beings seems to be a constellation in which the two poles (motherliness and fatherliness, female and male, mercy and justice, feeling and thought, nature and intellect) are united in a synthesis, in which both sides of the polarity lose their mutual antagonism and, instead, color each other.

This was the beginning of a rich Jewish tradition and, at the same time, of the loss of everything the Jews had had: their state, their temple, their priestly and military bureaucracy, their sacrificial animals, and their rituals. All were lost and they were left (as a group) with nothing except the ideal of being: knowing, learning, thinking, and

(The problem of education hinges on this point. If parents were more developed themselves and rested in their own center, the opposition between authoritarian and laissez-faire education would hardly exist. Needing this being-authority, the child reacts to it with great eagerness; on the other hand, the child rebels against pressure or neglect by p

The development of this economic system was no longer determined by the question: What is good for Man? but by the question: What is good for the growth of the system?