“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.”

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.