“There is no authentic inner freedom that does not, sooner or later, also affect and change human history.”

The creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.

There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change.

Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.

If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.

Therapy isn’t curing somebody of something; it is a means of helping a person explore himself, his life, his consciousness. My purpose as a therapist is to find out what it means to be human.

Love is generally confused with dependence; but in point of fact, you can love only in proportion to your capacity for independence.

It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way; and we grasp more fiercely at research, statistics, and technical aids in sex when we have lost the values and meaning of love.

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.

There is an energy field between humans. And, when we reach out in passion, it is met with an answering passion and changes the relationship forever.

The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them.

What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?

When people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility.

People only change when it becomes too dangerous to stay the way they are.

Courage is not a virtue of value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values. Without courage our love pales into mere dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism.

Fortunately, however, we no longer have to argue that self -love is not only necessary and good but that it also is a prerequisite for loving others.

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.

Every authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart…

The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.

You can feel when something’s authentic, and you can feel when it’s not: you know when someone’s trying to make the club record, or trying to make the girl record, or trying to make the thug record. It’s none of that. It’s just my emotions.

Every authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart.

Shamanism has always known this, and shamanism has always, in its most authentic expressions, taught that the path required allies.

In Tibetan, authentic presence is wangthang, which literally means, ‘field of power’… The cause or the virtue that brings about authentic presence is emptying out and letting go. You have to be without clinging.

Classes will dull your mind, destroy the potential for authentic creativity.

I mean, whatever kills you kills you, and your death is authentic no matter how you die.