“Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer”

I never want to take away something when I don’t have anything better to offer him in a way.

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.

What I do is make myself this over-the-top character that people either find endearing or they think is a joke. Then I can do anything I want.

I was never geeky about anything.

It’s hard to be an artist. It’s hard to be anything. It’s hard to be.

If I don’t feel right about what I’m in, I don’t feel right about anything.

So I never thought of anything as making fun of it, but kind of reveling in the melodrama of it. It’s a melodrama.

But anything that you hear about Japan is nothing like what you see when you actually go over there and see it, you know, in a real situation.

There’s one of a figure with two heads that somebody thought must be a comment on the state of matrimony. None of it is a comment on anything.

Health is the most critical thing in our life. With your health anything is possible, without it you can’t do anything.