Mature love is loving, not being loved.
Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.
To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.
As we reach the crest of life and look at the path before us, we apprehend that the path no longer ascends but slopes downward toward decline and diminishment. From that point on, concerns about death are never far from mind.
Psychotherapy is a cyclical process from isolation into relationship. It is cyclical because the patient, in terror of existential isolation, relates deeply and meaningfully to the therapist and then, strengthened by this encounter, is led back again to a confrontation with existential isolation.
Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don’t leave any unlived life behind.
Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one’s germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!
Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.
Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!
When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
Living safely is dangerous.
One comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself.
Death cures psychoneurosis. In a sense all these neurotic concerns – fear of rejection, interpersonal concerns – seem to melt away, and people get another perspective on their lives. The important things are really important, and the trivia of life is trivialized.
If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.
Therapists need to have a long experience in personal therapy to see what it’s like to be on the other side of the couch and see what they find helpful or not helpful. And if possible, get into therapy at different stages of their life with different kinds of therapists just to sample a bit.
The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
One doesn’t do existential therapy as a freestanding separate theory; rather it informs your approach to such issues as death, which many therapists tend to shy away from.