“Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.”

When you are completely absorbed or caught up in something, you become oblivious to things around you, or to the passage of time. It is this absorption in what you are doing that frees your unconscious and releases your creative imagination.

Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.

Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his world.

It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.

One does not become fully human painlessly.

What anxiety means is it’s as though the world is knocking at your door, and you need to create, you need to make something, you need to do something. I think anxiety, for people who have found their own heart and their own souls, for them it is a stimulus toward creativity, toward courage. It’s what makes us human beings.

This personal freedom to think and feel and speak authentically and to be conscious of so doing is the quality that distinguishes us as human.

Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one’s death.

Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men. … One person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him.

The mature person becomes able to differentiate feelings into as many nuances, strong and passionate experiences, or delicate and sensitive ones, as in the different passages of music in a symphony. Unfortunately, many of us have feelings limited like notes in a bugle call.

The creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.

There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change.

If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.

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.

Love is generally confused with dependence; but in point of fact, you can love only in proportion to your capacity for independence.

It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way; and we grasp more fiercely at research, statistics, and technical aids in sex when we have lost the values and meaning of love.

Perhaps you need to look back before you can move ahead.

You think you can do it better? Hey, go right ahead. The stage is yours.

This time you’ve dug yourself an anchor too heavy to move ahead with.

Go ahead, take out your dong.’ ‘I’m not taking out my dong. And by the way, who uses the word dong?

America looks 10 minutes ahead; Japan looks 10 years.

We can’t ignore the fact that ahead of us is a great war and this war is going to need significant preparation.

Go ahead, climb up onto the velvet top of the highest stakes table. Place yourself as the bet. Look God in the eyes and finally, for once in your life, lose.

Many filmmakers have made resurgent work, and I was just a little ahead of the time.