“None of my patients are really troubled by the idea that some part of what they say might be in a book in the future.”

One reason patients are reluctant to work in a therapy group is they fear that things will go too far, that the powerful therapist or the collective group might coerce them to lose control–to say or think or feel things that will be catastrophic.

Were not teaching our students the importance of relationships with other people: how you work with them, what the relational pathology consists of, how you examine your own conscience, how you examine the inner world, how you examine your dreams.

I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people.

If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.

… sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.

It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one’s germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!

If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.

If you want to choose the pleasure of growth, prepare yourself for some pain.

When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.

Life as a therapist is a life of service in which we daily transcend our personal wishes and turn our gaze toward the needs and growth of the other.

Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.

When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?

The therapist can make the group feel safer by allowing each patient to set his or her limits and by emphasizing the patient’s control over every interaction.

Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair.

You know, I think everybody I’ve seen has come from some other therapy, and almost invariably it’s very much the same thing: the therapist is too disinterested, a little too aloof, a little too inactive. They’re not really interested in the person, he doesn’t relate to the person.

Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.

Are you keeping anything else from me? Im keeping a lot of things from you. Like? Like the way i feel about being locked up in here with you. You have no idea what you do to me.

I do not need any writing, since I transmit teaching beyond words and ideas.

Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.

You have no idea where reality is, so to have an idea of what people think is pretty hard.

My idea of exercise is a good brisk sit.

Sometimes it’s easy to have ideas, but somebody has to find a way to do it. Often those responsible for finding a way don’t have the idea.

The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind.

I hated the company of other children. I wanted to be a grownup person, to be taken seriously. I hated the idea of childhood; I thought it was a moment of endless stupidity.