Creativity occurs as an act of encounter, and is to be understood with this encounter at the center.
All people are struggling to be creative in some way, and the artist is the one who has succeeded in this task of life.
Whatever sphere we may be in, there is a profound joy in the realization that we are helping to form the structure of the new world. This is creative courage, however minor or fortuitous our creations may be.
In my clinical experience, the greatest block to a person’s development is his having to take on a way of life which is not rooted in his own powers.
There is an energy field between humans. And, when we reach out in passion, it is met with an answering passion and changes the relationship forever.
Finding the center of strenghth within ourselves is in the long run best contribution we can do to our fellow man.
Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line.
If we admit our depression openly and freely, those around us get from it an experience of freedom rather than the depression itself.
Anxiety is essential to the human condition. The confrontation with anxiety can relieve us from boredom, sharpen the sensitivity and assure the presence of tension that is necessary to preserve human existence.
Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos.
This is hard for parents to say genuinely.
Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.
Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant.
Artists do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being.
When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.
The insight is born with anxiety, guilt and the joy and gratification that is inseparable from the actualizing of a new idea or vision.
There is a curiously sharp sense of joy – or perhaps better expressed, a sense of mild ecstasy – that comes when you find the particular form required by your creation.
Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.
The essence of being human is that, in the brief moment we exist on this spinning planet, we can love some persons and some things, in spite of the fact that time and death will ultimately claim us all.
What Kierkegaard said about love is also true of creativity: every person must start at the beginning.