“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.”

To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.

And if you do the latter, you’re not so worried about the everyday trivialities of life, for example, petty concerns about secrecy or privacy.

If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!

Living safely is dangerous.

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

Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence. . . and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.

I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.

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.

As we reach the crest of life and look at the path before us, we apprehend that the path no longer ascends but slopes downward toward decline and diminishment. From that point on, concerns about death are never far from mind.

Indeed, the evidence supporting the efficacy of group therapy, and the prevailing sentiment of the mental health profession, are sufficiently strong that it would be difficult to defend the adequacy of the inpatient unit that attempted to operate without a small group program.

There is some evidence, for example, that those who enter the death-related professions (soldiers, doctors, priests, and morticians) may in part be motivated by a need to obtain control over death anxiety.

All these things I’ve written so much about. That’s why I’ve made such a practice really, over and over to hammer home the point of self-revelation and being more of yourself and showing yourself. Every book I write I want to get that in there.

One comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself.

Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.

Some have expressed the very opposite feeling–the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead – when I exist in no one’s memory.

The reflexive mechanism of the mind -or whatever it is that allows us to be self-conscious – is cut off or permanently suspended so the mind is ever after held in a fixed now moment out of which it cannot move in its uninterrupted gaze upon the Unknown

The gaze of the wolf reached into our soul.

All the children stood and gazed at it, loving it and longing to go to it. It looked so secret – almost magic.

We can gaze at a person in the distance or at a cloud in the sky and be appreciative.

Yet nowherein a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.

Just hold on. Just for a minute.” “Are you all right ?” I found my gaze dropping towards his chair, afraid some part of him was pinched, or trapped, that I had got something wrong.

Patch’s eyes were slate black, darker than a million secrets stacked on top of each other. He dropped his gaze to the ring in his hand, turning it over slowly. “swear you’ll never stop loving me,” i whispered. Ever so slightly, he nodded.

I don’t even know which end of a computer one is supposed to gaze into. I’ve never used a computer.