“If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.”

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.

To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.

Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.

Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.

The death anxiety of many people is fueled … by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential.

My hunch is yes. It would certainly do something for those who are most ruthless, who tend to make others most miserable.

This was due to a kind of increased existential awareness that resulted from this confrontation with the death of another. And I think it brought them in touch with their own death, so they began to experience a kind of preciousness to life that comes with an experience of its transiency.

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

Absolute power, as we have always known, corrupts absolutely; it corrupts because it does not do the trick for the individual.

A sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves.

None of my patients are really troubled by the idea that some part of what they say might be in a book in the future.

I believe that Russia has a chance to be free. Has a chance. It’s difficult, but we must do it.

When there’s an opportunity to do more, we must.

Before taking the court for any game, you should do a lot of thinking about what you have to do to beat your opponent and what he must or can do to beat you.

When you can’t change your life any other way, you can still change your attitude. When you do, your life changes. You find more chances to love, and you will be surprised to see how much more love is returned to you.

But first we must be able to bequeath to our children the most fundamental of all rights, which preconditions all others; the right to survival.

One must live well to know what living is.

I bet, of course, but that’s misleading. One must encourage bloodstock breeding.

Edward Abbey said you must brew your own beer; kick in you Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.