Purpose in the human being is a much more complex phenomenon than what used to be called will power.
Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don’t find themselves at all.
Anxiety is an even better teacher than reality, for one can temporarily evade reality by avoiding the distasteful situation; but anxiety is a source of education always present because one carries it within.
People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day to day.
What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?
It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move on in one’s inward journey into new realms, than to stand defiantly for outer freedom. It is often easier to play the martyr, as it is to be rash in battle.
Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.
Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of one’s identity as a being of worth and dignity.
The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt.
Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one’s death.
A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.
It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.
One central need in life is to fulfill its own potential.
Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration.
One does not become fully human painlessly.
When you are completely absorbed or caught up in something, you become oblivious to things around you, or to the passage of time. It is this absorption in what you are doing that frees your unconscious and releases your creative imagination.
Freedom does not come automatically; it is achieved. And it is not gained in a single bound; it must be achieved each day.
It is amazing how many hints and guides and intuitions for living come to the sensitive person who has ears to hear what his body is saying.
Artists love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds.
We must always base our commitment in the center of our own being, or else no commitment will be ultimately authentic.