“We must understand love; we must be able to teach it, to create it, to predict it, or else the world is lost to hostility and to suspicion.”

What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.

The most fortunate are those who have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder and even ecstasy.

In a word, growth and improvement can come through pain and conflict.

If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life. You will be evading your own capacities, your own possibilities.

Perhaps adjustment and stabilization, while good because it cuts your pain, is also bad because development towards a higher ideal ceases?

The only happy people I know are the ones who are working well at something they consider important.

Be independent of the good opinion of other people.

Secrecy, censorship, dishonesty, and blocking of communication threaten all the basic needs.

What you don’t know has power over you; knowing it brings it under your control, and makes it subject to your choice. Ignorance makes real choice impossible.

Creativity is a characteristic given to all human beings at birth.

The spiritual life is part of the human essence. It is a defining characteristic of human nature, without which human nature is not fully human.

I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act. The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.

If the essential core of the person is denied or suppressed, he gets sick sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes immediately, sometimes later.

My mother was the most creative, fantastic person and would come up with great things for us to do. She’d buy art supplies and all of us would sit around painting. I was lucky.

Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.

If there is one thing that is foreign to me it is shopping for pleasure. On the other hand, I believe that it is right to honor all those who create beautiful things and give satisfaction to those who see me wearing them.

To sustain an environment suitable for man, we must fight on a thousand battlegrounds. Despite all of our wealth and knowledge, we cannot create a redwood forest, a wild river, or a gleaming seashore.

There is a terrific apprehension among some people that blacks will take over the sport… It will create problems because their behavior, speech and dress is just a completely different culture.

This world was not created piecemeal. Africa was born no later and no earlier than any other geographical area on this globe. Africans, no more and no less than other men, possess all human attributes, talents and deficiencies, virtues and faults.

Your body is not your art – it’s your paintbrush. Whether your paintbrush is a tall paintbrush or a thin paintbrush or a stocky paintbrush or a scratched up paintbrush is completely irrelevant.

There is no drop of water in the ocean, not even in the deepest parts of the abyss, that does not know and respond to the mysterious forces that create the tide.