“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.”

There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change.

Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.

If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.

Therapy isn’t curing somebody of something; it is a means of helping a person explore himself, his life, his consciousness. My purpose as a therapist is to find out what it means to be human.

Love is generally confused with dependence; but in point of fact, you can love only in proportion to your capacity for independence.

It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way; and we grasp more fiercely at research, statistics, and technical aids in sex when we have lost the values and meaning of love.

To believe fully and at the same moment to have doubts is not at all a contradiction: it presupposes a greater respect for truth, an awareness that truth always goes beyond anything that can be said or done at any given moment.

There is an energy field between humans. And, when we reach out in passion, it is met with an answering passion and changes the relationship forever.

The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them.

What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?

When people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility.

People only change when it becomes too dangerous to stay the way they are.

Courage is not a virtue of value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values. Without courage our love pales into mere dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism.

Fortunately, however, we no longer have to argue that self -love is not only necessary and good but that it also is a prerequisite for loving others.

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.

The teenage years are ridiculously crucial and hard and, um, awkward.

I would say that it’s important and probably crucial, but I wouldn’t say that everyone has to have it.

The women’s movement appeared at a very crucial moment in my life. There was a whole political movement asking such questions and others I had never asked.

I am counting on the private sector, because it is crucial to Senegal’s future.

I have discovered that there is a crucial difference between society’s image of old people and ‘us’ as we know and feel ourselves to be.

Trust me when I say: Your commitment to love is crucial in the awakening of the world.

Women must have seats at the table because peace is too crucial to be left only to the politicians or only to the male half of our world.

In any situation, location is crucial.