“Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.”

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.

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

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)

Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.

The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.

I must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.

I think we ripple on into others, just like a stone puts its ripples into a brook. That, for me, too, is a source of comfort. It kind of, in a sense, negates the sense of total oblivion.

I am really not interested or excited by repeating former successes.

Change is a natural form of progression.

I’m an actor to your floating palace, me in my truest form would drown you.

I watch everybody every night, from sitting down to being on their feet at the end, and I feel a sense of reinvention, of caring, presenting these songs in their purest form.

I say that homosexuality is not just a form of sex, it’s a form of love, and it deserves our respect for that reason.

The soul’s first adventure is the fight between two ideas: the wish to return to earth in a human form, and the desire to feel the freedom of having no form.

Yielding to Jesus will break every form of slavery in any human life.

As water by cooling and condensation becomes ice, so thought by condensation assumes physical form. Everything in the universe is thought in material form.