“… sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.”

Were not teaching our students the importance of relationships with other people: how you work with them, what the relational pathology consists of, how you examine your own conscience, how you examine the inner world, how you examine your dreams.

I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people.

If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.

It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one’s germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!

If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.

If you want to choose the pleasure of growth, prepare yourself for some pain.

When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.

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.

Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.

When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?

The therapist can make the group feel safer by allowing each patient to set his or her limits and by emphasizing the patient’s control over every interaction.

Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair.

You know, I think everybody I’ve seen has come from some other therapy, and almost invariably it’s very much the same thing: the therapist is too disinterested, a little too aloof, a little too inactive. They’re not really interested in the person, he doesn’t relate to the person.

Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.

Some sort of greater awareness of their own finiteness and what their time on earth really is, and what they really want to do with their lives, could help improve them.

Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer

The South resented giving the Afro-American his freedom, the ballot box and the Civil Rights Law.

You cannot give up on the American dream. We cannot allow our fears and our disappointments to lead us into silence and into inaction.

Love gives itself; it is not bought.

She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love.

Oh you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you

I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought.

Take by surprise and the world gives up resistance.

Leaving the European Union really does give us a chance as a country to become more outward-looking, to become more competitive, and to deepen our links with our partners right across the world.