“If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!”

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!

Sometimes to heal, you must first get hurt.

Lawyers are the first refuge of the incompetent.

If at first you don’t succeed. You can dust it off and try again. Dust yourself off and try again.

After the Apple II was introduced, then came the Commodore and the Tandy TRS-80.

Indeed, what is there that does not appear marvelous when it comes to our knowledge for the first time? How many things, too, are looked up on as quite impossible until they have been actually effected?

One of the first signs of a Spirit-filled life is enthusiasm!

This is not the first time in my life where you know going into a job that you’re going to hear in stereo what was wrong with what you did.

Nobody ever forgets their first night in the bush. It’s among the precious, meagre handful of life firsts that remain indelible.