“Most people experience both tragedy and joy in varying proportions. Any philosophy which leaves out either cannot be considered to be comprehensive.”

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.

We crave and fear becoming truly ourselves.

When people appear to be something other than good and decent, it is only because they are reacting to stress, pain, or the deprivation of basic human needs such as security, love, and self-esteem.

We may define therapy as a search for value.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, an poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

Don’t worry when you are not recognized but strive to be worthy of recognition.

What one can be, one must be!

The great lesson is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s backyard.

Appreciate again and again, freshly and naively the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder and even ecstasy, however stable these experiences may have become to others.

People are not evil; they are schlemiels.

False optimism sooner or later means disillusionment, anger and hopelessness.

The most stable, and therefore, the most healthy self-esteem is based on deserved respect from others rather than on external fame or celebrity and unwarranted adulation.

One of the goals of education should be to teach that life is precious.

Every person is, in part, his own project and makes himself.

Obviously the most beautiful fate, the most wonderful good fortune that can happen to any human being, is to be paid for doing that which he passionately loves to do.

It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually.

There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.

The mind may accept or deny that you are awareness, but either way it can’t really understand. It cannot comprehend. Thought cannot comprehend what is beyond thought.

The apathy and inattention of the average citizen is beyond comprehension.

All events are secretly interrelated; the sweep of all we are doing reaches beyond the horizon of our comprehension.

Understand well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand.

The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.

Horror gives place to wonder at your true account; The rest outstrips our comprehension; we give up.

There are three things in life which are real: God, human folly and laughter. Since the first two are beyond our comprehension, we must do what we can with the third.