Reason works better when emotions are present; the person sees sharper and more accurately when his emotions are engaged.
The rebel is committed to giving a form and pattern to the world. It is a pattern born of the indomitable thrust of the human mind, the mind which makes out of the mass of meaningless data in the world an order and a form.
When people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility.
Lacking positive myths to guide him, many a sensitive contemporary man finds only the model of the machine beckoning him from every side to make himself over into its image.
Man is the “ethical animal” ethical in potentiality even if, unfortunately, not in actuality. His capacity for ethical judgment like freedom, reason and the other unique characteristics of the human being is based upon his consciousness of himself.
Receptivity requires a nimbleness, a fine-honed sensitivity in order to let one’s self be the vehicle of whatever vision may emerge.
Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.
Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being. Creativity requires passion and commitment. It brings to our awareness what was previously hidden and points to new life. The experience is one of heightened consciousness: ecstasy.
By whatever name one calls it, genuine creativity is characterized by an intensity of awareness, a heightened consciousness.
Everyone has a need for significance; and if we can’t make that possible, or even probable, in our society, then it will be obtained in destructive ways.
Creativity is a yearning for immortality.
Now, I believe in life, and I believe in the joy of human existence, but these things cannot be experienced except as we also face the despair, also face the anxiety that every human being has to face if he lives with any creativity at all.
The most effective way to ensure the value of the future is to confront the present courageously and constructively.
If the will remains in protest, it stays dependent on that which it is protesting against.
To say a person is a coward has no more meaning than to say he is lazy: It simply tells us that some vital potentiality is unrealized or blocked.
Every act of genuine creativity means achieving a higher level of self-awareness and personal freedom.
The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line.
There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular – though profoundly mistaken – definition of myth as falsehood.
No one can separate themselves from one’s social group and remain healthy, because the very structure of personality is dependent on the community.
The hallmark of courage in our age of conformity is the capacity to stand on one’s own convictions – not obstinately or defiantly.