"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."

"Just as the poet is a menace to conformity, he is also a constant threat to political dictators. He is always on the verge of blowing up the assembly line of political power."

"Courage isrequired 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."

"Now, I believe in life, and I believe in the joy of human existence, but these things cannot be experienced except as we also face the despair, also face the anxiety that every human being has to face if he lives with any creativity at all."

"It is very difficult to appreciate from the outside what a person in severe anxiety is experiencing. Brown rightly remarked about his friends 'imploring a drowning man [me] to swim when they don't know that under the water his hands and feet are tied."

"Tenderness emerges from the fact that the two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we are all heir because we are individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not of two isolated selves but a union"

"The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth, no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them. People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage."

"Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations."

"It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths."

"These poets and other creative persons are the ones who express being itself, he held. As I would put it, these are the ones who enlarge human consciousness. Their creativity is the most basic manifestation of a man or woman fulfilling his or her own being in the world."

"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."

"The concept of encounter also enables us to make clearer the important distinction between talent and creativity. Talent may well have its neurological correlates and can be studied as 'given to a person. A man or woman may have talent whether he or she uses it or not; talent can probably be measured in the person as such. But creativity can be seen only in the act. If we were purists, we would not speak of a 'creative person, but only of a creative act."

"To say a person is a coward has no more meaning than to say he is lazy: It simply tells us that some vital potentiality is unrealized or blocked."

"There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change."

"Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built."

"The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it's not without doubt but in spite of doubt."

"Our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. The person without a myth is a person without a home...To be a member of one's community is to share in its myths."

"The most effective way to ensure the value of the future is to confront the present courageously and constructively."

"It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move on in one's inward journey into new realms, than to stand defiantly for outer freedom. It is often easier to play the martyr, as it is to be rash in battle."

"Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of sense of being. Rigid moralism is a compensatory mechanism by which the individual persuades himself to take over the external sanctions because he has no fundamental assurance that his own choices have any sanction of their own"

"Freedom is man's capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves."

"The cultural past is rigidly deterministic to the extent that the individual is unaware of it. An analogy, of course, is found in any psychoanalytic treatment: the patient is rigidly determined by past experiences and previously developed patterns to the extent that he is unaware of these experiences and patterns."

"A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence."

"In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone."

"Sisyphus, ' is an interpretation of the unavoidable limits to which everyone who is human is condemned. The constructive way of dealing with anxiety in this sense consists of learning to live with it, accepting it as a 'teacher, ' to borrow Kirkegaard's phrase, to school us in confronting our human destiny."

"Anxiety, with its concomitant feelings of helplessness, isolation, and conflict, is an exceedingly painful experience. One tends to be angry and resentful toward those responsible for placing him in such a situation of pain. Clinical experience yields many examples like the following: A dependent person, finding himself in a situation of responsibility with which he feels he cannot cope, reacts with hostility both toward those who have placed him in the situation and toward those (usually parents) who caused him to be unable to cope with it. Or he feels hostility toward his therapist, whom he believes should bail him out"

"Life is not a matter for simple optimism - for there is evil, nor for mere pessimism - for there is good. The possibility for good in the face of evil is what gives life tragic meaning."

"A fear is a reaction to a specific danger, to which the individual can make a specific adjustment. But what characterizes anxiety is the feeling of diffuseness and uncertainty and the experience of helplessness toward the threat."

"Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is."

"Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it."

"The fascist authoritarianism, characterized by sado - masochism and destructiveness, had a function which is comparable psychologically to a neurotic symptom - namely, fascism compensated for powerlessness and individual isolation and protected the individual from anxiety - creating situations. If one compare fascism to a neurotic symptom, it can be said that fascism is a neurotic form of community."

"One means of allaying anxiety is frantic activity. The anxiety arising out of the dilemma of powerlessness in the face of suprapersonal economic forces on one hand, but theoretical belief in the efficacy of individual effort on the other, was symptomized partly by excessive activism."

"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? The one thing we can be certain of is that if we let ourselves fully into the relationship for good or evil, we will not come out unaffected."