“A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.”

The amazing thing about love is that it is the best way to get to know ourselves.

Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration.

Understanding and love require a wisdom that comes only with age.

It is amazing how many hints and guides and intuitions for living come to the sensitive person who has ears to hear what his body is saying.

The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word Coeur, meaning “heart.” Thus just as one’s heart, by pumping blood to one’s arms, legs, and brain enables all the other physical organs to function.

Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have be the same person. (p. 35)

Humor is the healthy way of feeling “distance” between one’s self and the problem, a way of standing off and looking at one’s problem with perspective.

Competitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety.

Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. It takes courage to break out of the settled mold, but most find conformity more comfortable. This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it’s conformity.

Courage is required not only in a person’s occasional crucial decision for his own freedom, but in the little hour-to-hour decisions which place the bricks in the structure of his building of himself into a person who acts with freedom and responsibility.

The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face.

One central need in life is to fulfill its own potential.

All our feelings, like the artist’s paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.

Artists love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds.

People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day to day.

Anxiety is essential to the human condition. The confrontation with anxiety can relieve us from boredom, sharpen the sensitivity and assure the presence of tension that is necessary to preserve human existence.