“Suffering is nature’s way of indicating a mistaken attitude or way of behavior, and to the nonegocentric person every moment of suffering is the opportunity for growth. People should rejoice in suffering, strange as it sounds, for this is a sign of the availability of energy to transform their characters.”

When you are completely absorbed or caught up in something, you become oblivious to things around you, or to the passage of time. It is this absorption in what you are doing that frees your unconscious and releases your creative imagination.

Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.

Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his world.

It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.

One does not become fully human painlessly.

What anxiety means is it’s as though the world is knocking at your door, and you need to create, you need to make something, you need to do something. I think anxiety, for people who have found their own heart and their own souls, for them it is a stimulus toward creativity, toward courage. It’s what makes us human beings.

This personal freedom to think and feel and speak authentically and to be conscious of so doing is the quality that distinguishes us as human.

Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one’s death.

Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men. … One person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him.

The mature person becomes able to differentiate feelings into as many nuances, strong and passionate experiences, or delicate and sensitive ones, as in the different passages of music in a symphony. Unfortunately, many of us have feelings limited like notes in a bugle call.

The creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.

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.

Human beings are the only creatures on earth that claim a God and the only thing that behaves like it hasn’t got one.

The grown-up world was a very ordered society in the early ’60s, and I was coming out of it. America was even more ordered than anywhere else. I found it was a very restrictive society in thought and behavior and dress.

Motivation is an inner force that compels behavior. Your inner drives will propel you further and faster than external perks.

My mom took all of my behavior personally. Everything I did she thought it was an act of rebellion against her. But it was just me being me.

We are witnessing a seismic change in consumer behavior. That change is being brought about by technology and the access people have to information.

I don’t want to be my extrovert self all the time.

I don’t think individual media outlets will regulate. There are such things as self-regulatory organizations that will look at the members of the industry and their behavior and establish standards of behavior.

You never really know what’s going to happen. You never know what the audience is going to be like or how they’re going to behave.