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

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.

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.

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.

There was a time in our lives when we were so close that nothing seemed to obstruct our friendship and brotherhood, and only a small footbridge separated us.

Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.

Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.

If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?

Psychotherapy is a cyclical process from isolation into relationship. It is cyclical because the patient, in terror of existential isolation, relates deeply and meaningfully to the therapist and then, strengthened by this encounter, is led back again to a confrontation with existential isolation.

Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.

Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.

It’s not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It’s like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death’s terror.

The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.

Some piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.

To have any one of these without the others is self defeating in business.

It is a unit of the Russian Federation. Its political status is not to be discussed any more.

Any dream is possible if you are brave enough to do it YOUR way.

Gisele is having her time, and Shirley had her time, and maybe I will have my time.

I know all the girls, but we all work a lot and don’t have time to hang out together. They’re all really nice; I’ve never had a problem with any model.

This is where men and women are different, we can put aside petty competition for relationships – they can’t. It interferes.

I don’t settle in any other area of my life when it comes to excellence, so why should I lower my standards when it comes to boys?

And when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work, because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is the beginning of the end of any nation.