“Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.”

This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.

The drive for power is not uncommonly motivated by this dynamic. One’s own fear and sense of limitation is avoided by enlarging oneself and one’s sphere of control.

There was a time in our lives when we were so close that nothing seemed to obstruct our friendship and brotherhood, and only a small footbridge separated us.

Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.

If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?

Psychotherapy is a cyclical process from isolation into relationship. It is cyclical because the patient, in terror of existential isolation, relates deeply and meaningfully to the therapist and then, strengthened by this encounter, is led back again to a confrontation with existential isolation.

Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.

Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.

It’s not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It’s like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death’s terror.

The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.

Some piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.

Love is not just a passion spark between two people; there is infinite difference between falling in love and standing in love.

The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.

Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!

Hidden in disguise, leaking out in a variety of symptoms. It is the wellspring of many of our worries, stresses, and conflicts.

Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.

Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.

Reading and sauntering and lounging and dosing, which I call thinking, is my supreme Happiness.

You are what you think. So just think big, believe big, act big, work big, give big, forgive big, laugh big, love big and live big.

A purpose, an intention, a design, strikes everywhere even the careless, the most stupid thinker.

That we live in a post-truth society today, and that we don’t care, that we have lost empathy. We have stopped caring for each other in a way. We have stopped thinking long-term and sustainable. And that’s something that goes much deeper than just climate crisis deniers.

Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.

To think? That’s it. It is thought. This alone cannot be detached from me. I am, I exist; that is certain.

I think in many ways that we autistic are the normal ones and the rest of the people are pretty strange.