Vanity and narcissism – the compulsive need to be admired and praised – undermine one’s courage, for one then fights on someone else’s conviction rather than one’s own.
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.
Understanding and love require a wisdom that comes only with age.
Those we call saints rebelled against an outmoded and inadequate form of God on the basis of their new insights into divinity.
The danger always exists that our technology will serve as a buffer between us and nature, a block between us and the deeper dimensions of our own experience.
To believe fully and at the same moment to have doubts is not at all a contradiction: it presupposes a greater respect for truth, an awareness that truth always goes beyond anything that can be said or done at any given moment.
It is infinitely safer to know that the man at the top has his doubts, as you and I have ours, yet has the courage to move ahead in spite of these doubts.
The turtle only makes progress when it’s neck is stuck out.
The receptivity of the artist must never be confused with passivity. Receptivity is the artist’s holding him or herself alive and open to hear what being may speak.