“One thing I feel clear about is that it’s important not to let your life live you. Otherwise, you end up at forty feeling you haven’t really lived. What have I learned? Perhaps to live now, so that at fifty I won’t look back upon my forties with regret.”

Some piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.

Love is not just a passion spark between two people; there is infinite difference between falling in love and standing in love.

The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.

Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!

Hidden in disguise, leaking out in a variety of symptoms. It is the wellspring of many of our worries, stresses, and conflicts.

Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.

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.

They are just 100 per cent bear, whereas human beings feel we’re not 100 per cent human, that we’re always letting ourselves down. We’re constantly striving towards something, to some fulfilment.

My feet ain’t got nothing to do with my nickname, but when folks get it in their heads that a feller’s got big feet, soon the feet start looking big.

They who go Feel not the pain of parting; it is they Who stay behind that suffer.

I feel like I have a job to do, like I constantly have to reinvent myself.

Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.

Joy, feeling one’s own value, being appreciated and loved by others, feeling useful and capable of production are all factors of enormous value for the human soul.

I never treat it like a job or feel that way. It’s the best thing ever to me, and I feel like a kid in a candy store.

With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you’ve fallen into good hands – someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.