“Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.”

Reality always creeps in–the reality of our helplessness and our mortality; the reality that, despite our reach for the stars, a creaturely fate awaits us.

Heidegger makes the distinction between being absorbed in the way things are in the world and being aware that things are in the world.

Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)

A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.

Many people are in despair because their dreams didn’t come true, and they despair even more that they did not make them come true.

Therapists need to have a long experience in personal therapy to see what it’s like to be on the other side of the couch and see what they find helpful or not helpful. And if possible, get into therapy at different stages of their life with different kinds of therapists just to sample a bit.

A free man who lives among the ignorant strives as far as he can to avoid their favors. A free man acts honestly, not deceptively.

Death, however, does itch. It itches all the time. It is always with us, scratching at some inner door.

The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.

If I’m among men who don’t agree at all with my nature, I will hardly be able to accommodate myself to them without greatly changing myself.

You will search the world over and not find a nonsuperstitious community. As long as there is ignorance, there will be adherence to superstition. Dispelling ignorance is the only solution. That is why I teach.

A curious thought experiment. . . Nietzsche’s message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally

The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.

I don’t let any personal views about religion cause me to want to take away something that’s offering the patient comfort.

One doesn’t do existential therapy as a freestanding separate theory; rather it informs your approach to such issues as death, which many therapists tend to shy away from.

There are borderlines and there are borderlines. Labels do violence to people. You can’t treat the label; you have to treat the person behind the label. (17)

Those three words, Monday Night Football, resonate like no other.

And if those two other doctors get paid by Big Snack Food, like certain climate deniers get paid by Big Coal, I shouldn’t take their advice.

Minding my own business, humming out a ‘Frere Jacques’ – and I realized that in any other town, this might be considered cute. But you know what it is in San Francisco? Sexy.

I didn’t have a mother; I had a mama. I measure other women by the stature of my mama.

My dad always told me to stand up to bullies, and Bill O’Reilly is kind of a bully, and he’s the kind of kid who hits other kids on the playground.

Every day is Thanksgiving.On this stage you’re going to hear God and none of them other words, and I ain’t going to touch my stuff.

Forget about every other lesson in the book.

I don’t have anything against organized religions, except when they engender hatred for other religions.