“To the best of my knowledge, every acute inpatient ward offers some inpatient group therapy experience.”

The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.

Mature love is loving, not being loved.

He had learned long ago that, in general, the easier it was for anxious patients to reach him, the less likely they were to call. (107)

Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?

I think my quarry is illusion. I war against magic. I believe that, though illusion often cheers and comforts, it ultimately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit.

Reality always creeps in–the reality of our helplessness and our mortality; the reality that, despite our reach for the stars, a creaturely fate awaits us.

Heidegger makes the distinction between being absorbed in the way things are in the world and being aware that things are in the world.

Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)

A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.

Many people are in despair because their dreams didn’t come true, and they despair even more that they did not make them come true.

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.

…all the most acute, most powerful, and most deadly diseases, and those which are most difficult to be understood by the inexperienced, fall upon the brain.

The only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private and where food can be poked in to him with a stick.

We’re highly social animals – I’m told by scientists that what makes us different from other animals is an acute social awareness, which is what has made us so successful.

There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.

William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour.

What everyone underestimated was the acute unpopularity of the Taliban, even in the Pashtun areas.

As the antagonism between those who possess, and those who do not, is becoming more acute day after day.