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

Vanity and narcissism – the compulsive need to be admired and praised – undermine one’s courage, for one then fights on someone else’s conviction rather than one’s own.

Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies.

A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born.

The amazing thing about love is that it is the best way to get to know ourselves.

Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration.

Understanding and love require a wisdom that comes only with age.

It is amazing how many hints and guides and intuitions for living come to the sensitive person who has ears to hear what his body is saying.

The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word Coeur, meaning “heart.” Thus just as one’s heart, by pumping blood to one’s arms, legs, and brain enables all the other physical organs to function.

Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have be the same person. (p. 35)

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.

The next time you are encouraged to fall into line, to be a sport and everything in you says no – be courageous and go your own way. There is no compensation in conformity.

From now on, I’ll connect the dots my own way.

With the spread of conformity and image-driven superficiality, the allure of an individuated woman in full possession of herself and her powers will prove irresistible.

All art is based on non-conformity.

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.

Resisting conformity and developing some small eccentricities are among the steps to independence and self-confidence.

Communism is the death of the soul. It is the organization of total conformity

In ourselves we harbor the intuition of another evolution, of other possibilities of life.