“Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.”

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.

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?

You can’t learn anything from being perfect.

Can we all just stop being dicks?!

My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.

Home is where you can be yourself.

Being who you are is a lot easier than faking it.

I do think the job of a writer is to raise questions and nobody likes the questions being asked.

Stress, in addition to being itself, was also the cause of itself, and the result of itself.

I’m so busy trying to breathe through the pain that I’m breathing through the pain of being with people, and that is no way to spend a life.