“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.”

To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive – to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before

All people are struggling to be creative in some way, and the artist is the one who has succeeded in this task of life.

So courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.

Freedom does not come automatically; it is achieved. And it is not gained in a single bound; it must be achieved each day.

There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular – though profoundly mistaken – definition of myth as falsehood.

Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don’t find themselves at all.

This is what our society needs – not new ideas and inventions; important as these are, and not geniuses and supermen, but persons who can be, that is, persons who have a center of strength within themselves.

One of the easiest ways to be irresponsible about power is to forget you have it.

Heroes are necessary in order to enable the citizens to find their own ideals, courage and wisdom in the society. The hero carries our hopes, our aspirations, our ideals, our beliefs. In the deepest sense the hero is created by us; he or she is born collectively as our own myth.

The danger always exists that our technology will serve as a buffer between us and nature, a block between us and the deeper dimensions of our own experience.

I learned that healing and cure are active processes in which I myself needed to participate.

In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.

Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.

The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt.

Creativity is neither the product of neurosis nor simple talent, but an intense courageous encounter with the Gods.

I’ve heard of their curing syphilis by giving the patient malaria, but I’ve never heard of their curing malaria by giving the patient syphilis.