118 quotes
The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt.
The Courage to Create (1975)
When you write a poem, you discover that the very necessity of fitting your meaning into such and such a form requires you to search in your imagination for new meanings.
The Courage to Create (1975)
When we "fall" in love, as the expressive verb puts it, the world shakes and changes around us, not only in the way it looks but in our whole experience of what we are doing in the world.
Love and Will (1969)
The self is made up, on its growing edge, of the models, forms, metaphors, myths, and all other kinds of psychic content which give it direction in its self-creation. This is a process that goes on continuously.
The Courage to Create (1975)
Physical courage in whatever scene … seems to hinge on whether the individual can feel he is fighting for others as well as himself.
Power and Innocence (1972)
It is highly significant, and indeed almost a rule, that moral courage has its source in identification through one's own sensitivity with the suffering of one's fellow human beings.
The Courage to Create (1975)
Thinking and self-creating are inseparable. When we become aware of all the fantasies in which we see ourselves in the future, pilot ourselves this way or that, this becomes obvious.
The Courage to Create (1975)
To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive — to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before.
Love and Will (1969)
Whatever sphere we may be in, there is a profound joy in the realization that we are helping to form the structure of the new world.
The Courage to Create (1975)
Power is required for communication.
Power and Innocence (1972)
Our passion for form expresses our yearning to make the world adequate to our needs and desires, and, more important, to experience ourselves as having significance.
The Courage to Create (1975)
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.
Man’s Search for Himself (1953)
In any age courage is the simple virtue needed for a human being to traverse the rocky road from infancy to maturity of personality. But in an age of anxiety, an age of her morality and personal isolation, courage is a sine qua non.
Man’s Search for Himself (1953)
Art is a substitute for violence.
Power and Innocence (1972)
The constructive schizoid person stands against the spiritual emptiness of encroaching technology and does not let himself be emptied by it. He lives and works with the machine without becoming a machine.
Love and Will (1969)
The value of dreams, like … divinations, is not that they give a specific answer, but that they open up new areas of psychic reality, shake us out of our customary ruts, and throw light on a new segment of our lives.
The Courage to Create (1975)
Freud was in error when he held that religion is per se a compulsion neurosis. Some religion is and some is not.
Man’s Search for Himself (1953)
We are more apt to feel depressed by the perpetually smiling individual than the one who is honestly sad. If we admit our depression openly and freely, those around us get from it an experience of freedom rather than the depression itself.
Paulus : Reminiscences of a Friendship (1973)
Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men.
Man’s Search for Himself (1953)
The creative process must be explored not as the product of sickness, but as representing the highest degree of emotional health, as the expression of the normal people in the act of actualizing themselves.
The Courage to Create (1975)