“Real freedom is the ability to pause between stimulus and response, and in that pause, choose.”

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.

Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.

Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us. Like a chemical mixture, if one of us is changed, both of us will be. Will we grow in self-actualization, or will it destroy us?

In my clinical experience, the greatest block to a person’s development is his having to take on a way of life which is not rooted in his own powers.

Depression is the inability to construct a future.

Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, “This is me and the world be damned!” Leaders have always been the ones to stand against the society – Socrates, Christ, Freud, all the way down the line.