“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.”

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.

When I fall in love, I feel more valuable and I treat myself with more care. We have all observed the hesitant adolescent, uncertain of himself, who, when he or she falls in love, suddenly walks with a certain inner assuredness and confidence/

However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings.

One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves.

The one thing we can be certain of is that if we let ourselves fully into the relationship for good or evil, we will not come out unaffected.

People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage.

Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant.

Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.

Real freedom is the ability to pause between stimulus and response, and in that pause, choose.

Suffering is nature’s way of indicating a mistaken attitude or way of behavior, and to the nonegocentric person every moment of suffering is the opportunity for growth. People should rejoice in suffering, strange as it sounds, for this is a sign of the availability of energy to transform their characters.