“Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being. Creativity requires passion and commitment. It brings to our awareness what was previously hidden and points to new life. The experience is one of heightened consciousness: ecstasy.”

Humor is the healthy way of feeling “distance” between one’s self and the problem, a way of standing off and looking at one’s problem with perspective.

Competitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety.

Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. It takes courage to break out of the settled mold, but most find conformity more comfortable. This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it’s conformity.

Courage is required not only in a person’s occasional crucial decision for his own freedom, but in the little hour-to-hour decisions which place the bricks in the structure of his building of himself into a person who acts with freedom and responsibility.

The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face.

One central need in life is to fulfill its own potential.

All our feelings, like the artist’s paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.

Artists love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds.

People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day to day.

Anxiety is essential to the human condition. The confrontation with anxiety can relieve us from boredom, sharpen the sensitivity and assure the presence of tension that is necessary to preserve human existence.

Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable.

The hallmark of courage in our age of conformity is the capacity to stand on one’s own convictions – not obstinately or defiantly

Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell.

Does not the possibility or the power to do something about the situation at hand confer on one the responsibility to do it?

A mien which seems to say, “You are looking at somebody now.” For this inner sense of worth that comes with being in love does not seem to depend essentially on whether the love is returned or not.

There is no authentic inner freedom that does not, sooner or later, also affect and change human history.

At the heart of every being lies creation’s dream of a principle that will one day give organic form to its fragmented treasures. God is unity.

Of all our infirmities, the most savage is to despise our being.

Being happy is a matter of personal taste.

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

What I cry out for, like every being, with my whole life and all my earthly passion, is something very different from an equal to cherish: it is a God to adore.

If you’re playing baseball and thinking about managing, you’re crazy. You’d be better off thinking about being an owner.

It wasn’t a being-with-each-other kind of close. We all went our own ways.

Not being known doesn’t stop the truth from being true.