“Life as a therapist is a life of service in which we daily transcend our personal wishes and turn our gaze toward the needs and growth of the other.”

Some have expressed the very opposite feeling–the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead – when I exist in no one’s memory.

To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.

Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.

Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.

The death anxiety of many people is fueled … by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential.

My hunch is yes. It would certainly do something for those who are most ruthless, who tend to make others most miserable.

This was due to a kind of increased existential awareness that resulted from this confrontation with the death of another. And I think it brought them in touch with their own death, so they began to experience a kind of preciousness to life that comes with an experience of its transiency.

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

Absolute power, as we have always known, corrupts absolutely; it corrupts because it does not do the trick for the individual.

A sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves.

None of my patients are really troubled by the idea that some part of what they say might be in a book in the future.

To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.

Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don’t leave any unlived life behind.

Since then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn’t. But when you now think of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel.

Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.

Once I saw a chimpanzee gaze at a particularly beautiful sunset for a full 15 minutes.

Tell us please, what treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?”….I met his gaze and I did not blink. “Words of comfort,” I said to my father.

I leaned forward on the table and leveled her with my steady gaze. “Do not ever speak to her that way again. If she hadn’t agreed to come with me I wouldn’t have come. Don’t underestimate her importance. She’s mine. Respect that.

My dearest contradiction. You are soft and obliterating, like the moon’s glare upon a sinner.

Eases our darkness into daylight. Oceans apart, but what remains the same, is our eyes gazing at the same moon.

A sky is full of stars. Still, I am gazing at her eyes.

I gaze into the moon I’ll find my place in the darkness soon.

All I need is her lap to rest and her smile to gaze.