“An experience associated only once with a bereavement, an accident, or a battle, may become the center of a permanent phobia or complex, not in the least dependent on a recurrence of the original shock.”

Extreme bigots are almost always super-patriots.

Since we think about ourselves so much of the time, it is comforting to assume … that we really know the score…. [But] this is not an easy assignment.

Love-incomparably the greatest psychotherapeutic agent-is something that professional psychiatry cannot of itself create, focus, nor release.

The specific goals we set for ourselves are almost always subsidiary to our long range intentions.

[As] Santayana wrote, ‘Nothing requires a rarer intellectual heroism than willingness to see one’s equation written out.’

Love received and love given comprise the best form of therapy.

From adolescence onward, however, the surest clue to personality is the hierarchy of interests, including the loves and loyalties of adult life.

There is a story of an Oxford student who once remarked, “I despise all Americans, but have never met one I didn’t like.”

The mature religious sentiment is ordinarily fashioned in the workshop of doubt.

The dog [in Pavlov’s experiments] does not continue to salivate whenever it hears a bell unless sometimes at least an edible offering accompanies the bell.

A good parent, a good neighbour, a good citizen, is not good because his specific goals are acceptable, but because his successive goals are ordered to a dependable and socially desirable set of values. (1947)

As partisans of our own way of life, we cannot help thinking in a partisan manner.

And sometimes no amount of punishment can make us repudiate our loyalty.

But there are innumerable instances in human life where a single association, never reinforced, results in the establishment of a life-long dynamic system.

If a person is capable of rectifying his erroneous judgments in the light of new evidence he is not prejudiced.

The outlines of the needed psychology of becoming can be discovered by looking within ourselves; for it is knowledge of our own uniqueness that supplies the first, and probably the best, hints for acquiring orderly knowledge of others.

The circumference of life cannot be rightly drawn until the center is set.

If God is not at the center of your life, something else is.

Find your center and stay there.

We’re talking about a world where the PC is no longer the center, but just a devicewhere your new devices need to be more portable, more personal.

I was at Rutgers University, and that was a center for Fluxus in a way. But it wasn’t what I was interested in.

All these financiers, all the little gnomes of Zürich and the other financial centres, about whom we keep on hearing.

I think I’m the only player who looks at each and every center and says to myself, ‘That’s barbecued chicken down there.’

There is in the universe neither center nor circumference.