“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.”

Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, “This is me and the world be damned!” Leaders have always been the ones to stand against the society – Socrates, Christ, Freud, all the way down the line.

It is well to remind ourselves that anxiety signifies a conflict, and so long as a conflict is going on, a constructive solution is possible.

The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have.

Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.

Religion is whatever the individual takes to be his ultimate concern. One’s religious attitude is to be found at that point where he has a conviction that there are values in human existence worth living and dying for.

Forge in the smithy of your soul.

Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act.

It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.

The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.

Apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice.

Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of one’s identity as a being of worth and dignity.

A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.

Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears.

Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being. Creativity requires passion and commitment. It brings to our awareness what was previously hidden and points to new life. The experience is one of heightened consciousness: ecstasy.

Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously.

When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.

Live never to be ashamed if anything you say or do is published around the world, even if what is said is not true.

We ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It’s about conflicts between creation stories.

There is a serious tendency toward capitalism among the well-to-do peasants.

Two hundred million Americans, and there ain’t two good catchers among ’em.

Whitman will always be a strange and unwonted figure among his country’s poets, and among English poets generally: a cropping out again, after so many centuries, of the old bardic prophetic strain.

We moralize among ruins.

The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control – ‘indoctrination’, we might say – exercised through the mass media.

The pond-lily is a star and easily takes the first place among lilies; and the expeditions to her haunts, and the gathering her where she rocks upon the dark.