“This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.”

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.

A curious thought experiment. . . Nietzsche’s message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally

The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.

I don’t let any personal views about religion cause me to want to take away something that’s offering the patient comfort.

One doesn’t do existential therapy as a freestanding separate theory; rather it informs your approach to such issues as death, which many therapists tend to shy away from.

Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.

There are borderlines and there are borderlines. Labels do violence to people. You can’t treat the label; you have to treat the person behind the label. (17)

Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.

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

I must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.

I think we ripple on into others, just like a stone puts its ripples into a brook. That, for me, too, is a source of comfort. It kind of, in a sense, negates the sense of total oblivion.

We project ourselves into the future through our children; we grow rich, famous, ever larger; we develop compulsive protective rituals; or we embrace an impregnable belief in an ultimate rescuer.

Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.

If I had to pick out a therapist in a movie that I’d like to go see as a personal therapist, it would be Robin Williams in Goodwill Hunting.

I feel strongly, because a man who will himself die one day in the not to distant future and, also, as a psychiatrist who spent decades dealing with death anxiety, that confronting death allows us, not to open some noisome.

The drive for power is not uncommonly motivated by this dynamic. One’s own fear and sense of limitation is avoided by enlarging oneself and one’s sphere of control.

The rainbows that dangle upon this mist: shatter. Like the smile of a child separated from his mother’s milk for the very first time.from poem Blood and Blossoms

We are ever blossoming.

The blossom cannot tell what becomes of its odor, and no person can tell what becomes of his or her influence and example.

Gray hairs are death’s blossoms.

Gratitude is the fairest blossom which springs from the soul.

Spill yourself onto the page with ink and a half healed heart and watch the words blossom.

He who lives only unto himself withers and dies, while he who forgets himself in the service of others grows and blossoms.

You deflowered me. Still I blossomed.