Real freedom is the ability to pause between stimulus and response, and in that pause, choose.
There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change.
A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born.
Love is generally confused with dependence; but in point of fact, you can love only in proportion to your capacity for independence.
However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings.
Poets often have a conscious awareness that they are struggling with the daimonic, and that the issue is their working something through from the depths which push the self to a new plane.
The daimonic is any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person. Sex and eros, anger and rage, and the craving for power are examples. The daimonic can be either creative or destructive and is normally both.
Humor is the healthy way of feeling “distance” between one’s self and the problem, a way of standing off and looking at one’s problem with perspective.
Competitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety.
Terrorism and the whole drug scene are vivid examples of the fact that what persons abhor most of all in life is the possibility that they will not matter.
There is no meaningful yes unless the individual could also have said no.
The schizoid man is the natural product of the technological man. It is one way to live and is increasingly utilized and it may explode into violence.
They pursue meaninglessness until they force it to mean.
A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.
It may sound surprising when I say, on the basis of my own clinical practice as well as that of my psychological and psychiatric colleagues, that the chief problem of people in the middle decade of the twentieth century is emptiness.
In religion, it is not the sycophants or those who cling most faithfully to the status quo who are ultimately praised. It is the insurgents.
Every authentic artist is engaged in this creating of the conscience of the race, even though he or she may be unaware of the fact.
By the creative act, we are able to reach beyond our own death.
Apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice.
Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being.