Every man is an island, especially here in the metropolis.
It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement,
that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others
and that they underestimate what is a true value in life.
There are a few men from whom their contemporaries do not withhold admiration.
Although their greatness rests on attributes and achievements, which are completely foreign to the aims and ideals of the multitude.
What decides the purpose of life is simply the program of the pleasure principle.
This principle dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start.
And yet this program is at loggerheads with the whole world.
There is no possibility at all of its being carried through.
What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the satisfaction of needs which have been damned up to a high degree.
And it is from its nature only possible as an episodic phenomenon.
The program of becoming happy, which the pleasure principle imposes on us, cannot be fulfilled.
Yet we must not, indeed we cannot, give up our efforts to bring it nearer to fulfillment by some means or other.
Very different paths may be taken in that direction.
There is no golden rule which applies to everyone.
Every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved.
Any choice that is pushed to an extreme will be penalized by exposing the individual to the dangers which arise if a technique of living that has been chosen as an exclusive one should prove the man to be.
Our success is never certain, but that depends on the convergence of many factors.
Perhaps on none more than on the capacity of the psyche to adapt its function to the environment and then to exploit that environment for a yield of pleasure.
The true source of religious experience consists in a peculiar feeling which is present in millions of people, a feeling we can call a sensation of eternity, a feeling as if something limitless and bound as it were oceanic.
A feeling of an indissoluble bond of being one with the external world as a whole.
