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.
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.