“A mien which seems to say, “You are looking at somebody now.” For this inner sense of worth that comes with being in love does not seem to depend essentially on whether the love is returned or not.”

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.

Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies.

A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born.

The amazing thing about love is that it is the best way to get to know ourselves.

Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration.

Understanding and love require a wisdom that comes only with age.

It is amazing how many hints and guides and intuitions for living come to the sensitive person who has ears to hear what his body is saying.

The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word Coeur, meaning “heart.” Thus just as one’s heart, by pumping blood to one’s arms, legs, and brain enables all the other physical organs to function.

Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have be the same person. (p. 35)

Humor is the healthy way of feeling “distance” between one’s self and the problem, a way of standing off and looking at one’s problem with perspective.

Competitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety.

Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. It takes courage to break out of the settled mold, but most find conformity more comfortable. This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it’s conformity.

Courage is required not only in a person’s occasional crucial decision for his own freedom, but in the little hour-to-hour decisions which place the bricks in the structure of his building of himself into a person who acts with freedom and responsibility.

The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face.

One central need in life is to fulfill its own potential.

A cinema villain essentially needs a moustache so he can twiddle with it gleefully as he cooks up his next nasty plan.

The Grateful Dead plays at religious services essentially.

NATO’s essentially run by the United States.

Crony capitalism is essentially a condition in which… public officials are giving favours to people in the private sector in payment of political favours.

It is not the contact with an essentially foreign population that corrupts the inhabitants of the great foreign resorts.

He heard the NPR show, contacted them, and essentially – shortest synopsis ever, like I’m the Cablevision guide button

They’re essentially engaging in a scorched-earth litigation strategy that is beginning with trying to discredit the prosecutor.

I don’t think there’s anything that I would call essentially Brazilian in João Gilberto Noll work. In that regard, it translates very well to a cosmopolitan audience.