Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.
The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
I must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.
I don’t let any personal views about religion cause me to want to take away something that’s offering the patient comfort. I never want to take away something when I don’t have anything better to offer him in a way.
Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead – when I exist in no one’s memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies, too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?
It is easier, far easier, to obey another than to command oneself.
Dissect your motives deeper! You will find that no one has ever done anything wholly for others. All actions are self-directed, all service is self-serving, all love self-loving.
To build children you must first be built yourself. Otherwise, you’ll seek children out of animal needs, or loneliness, or to patch the holes in yourself. Your task as a parent is to produce not another self, another Josef, but something higher. It’s to produce a creator.
I do not like to work with patients who are in love. Perhaps it is because of envy – I, too, crave enchantment. Perhaps it is because love and psychotherapy are fundamentally incompatible. The good therapist fights darkness and seeks illumination, while romantic love is sustained by mystery and crumbles upon inspection. I hate to be love’s executioner.
Time cannot be broken; that is our greatest burden. And our greatest challenge is to live in spite of that burden.
The flower replied: You fool! Do you imagine I blossom in order to be seen? I blossom for my own sake because it pleases me, and not for the sake of others. My joy consists in my being and my blossoming.
One of the great paradoxes of life is that self-awareness breeds anxiety.
Ask yourself, ‘Who are the secure ones, the comfortable, the eternally cheerful?’ I’ll tell you the answer: only those with dull vision-the common people and the children.
To fully relate to another, one must first relate to oneself. If we cannot embrace our own aloneness, we will simply use the other as a shield against isolation.
More in love with desire than with the desired!
People who feel empty never heal by merging with another incomplete person. On the contrary, two broken-winged birds coupled into one make for clumsy flight. No amount of patience will help it fly; and, ultimately, each must be pried from the other, and wounds separately splinted. The.
A person of high, rare mental gifts who is forced into a job which is merely useful is like a valuable vase decorated with the most beautiful painting and then used as a kitchen pot.
The human being either asserts autonomy by heroic self-assertion or seeks safety through fusing with a superior force: that is, one either emerges or merges, separates or embeds. One becomes one’s own parent or remains the eternal child.
Marriage should be no prison, but a garden in which something higher is cultivated.
A cosmic perspective always attenuates tragedy. If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.