“Hidden in disguise, leaking out in a variety of symptoms. It is the wellspring of many of our worries, stresses, and conflicts.”

I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people.

If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.

… sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.

It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one’s germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!

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

If you want to choose the pleasure of growth, prepare yourself for some pain.

When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.

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.

Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.

When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?

The therapist can make the group feel safer by allowing each patient to set his or her limits and by emphasizing the patient’s control over every interaction.

Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair.

You know, I think everybody I’ve seen has come from some other therapy, and almost invariably it’s very much the same thing: the therapist is too disinterested, a little too aloof, a little too inactive. They’re not really interested in the person, he doesn’t relate to the person.

Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.

Some sort of greater awareness of their own finiteness and what their time on earth really is, and what they really want to do with their lives, could help improve them.

Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer

It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion, and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust.

Sometimes The Devil is a gentleman.

You are a beautiful blessing in disguise. A power punch that makes me high.

The agony comes in waves. Pulling me down into its treacherous depths disguised as love. You are inviting and warm, but unpredictable and dangerous.

Pleasure disguised himself as happiness and stole life away.

Every experience is really just a lesson in disguise. Don’t let it go to waste.

Pain is a two-way street, sometimes it drags you till the verge of insanity and sometimes it is a blessing in disguise. 

We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting.