“…the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.”

I feel strongly, because a man who will himself die one day in the not to distant future and, also, as a psychiatrist who spent decades dealing with death anxiety, that confronting death allows us, not to open some noisome.

This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.

The drive for power is not uncommonly motivated by this dynamic. One’s own fear and sense of limitation is avoided by enlarging oneself and one’s sphere of control.

There was a time in our lives when we were so close that nothing seemed to obstruct our friendship and brotherhood, and only a small footbridge separated us.

Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.

Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.

If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?

Psychotherapy is a cyclical process from isolation into relationship. It is cyclical because the patient, in terror of existential isolation, relates deeply and meaningfully to the therapist and then, strengthened by this encounter, is led back again to a confrontation with existential isolation.

Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.

Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.

It’s not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It’s like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death’s terror.

The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.

Some piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.

Love is not just a passion spark between two people; there is infinite difference between falling in love and standing in love.

The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.

Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!

There is something fresh and crisp about the first hours of a Caribbean day, a happy anticipation that something is about to happen, maybe just up the street or around the next corner.

Curled up in a ball slowly shutting down as my body is being devoured by those ugly, fearsome monsters that have lived in my guts ever since I could remember.

No one is moved to act, or resolves to speak a single word, who does not hope by means of this action or word to release anxiety from his spirit.

This is not my phrase, but if you’re stuck in the past, then you’re depressed. If you’re stuck in the future, then you’re anxious.

Anxiety is the greatest evil that can befall a soul, except sin. God commands you to pray, but He forbids you to worry.

Anxiety is the natural result when our hopes are centered in anything short of God and His will.

Where there is peace and meditation, there is neither anxiety nor doubt.

Risk, then, is not just part of life. It is life. The place between your comfort zone and your dream is where life takes place. It’s the high-anxiety zone, but it’s also where you discover who you are.