Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Living safely is dangerous.
Mature love is loving, not being loved.
Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)
Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.
The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer
... sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.
To the extent that one is responsible for one's life, one is alone.
One comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself.
If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.
Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one's life!
I don't want to be idealized by a patient because of what I've written.
Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.
Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
If you want to choose the pleasure of growth, prepare yourself for some pain.
Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
When people don't have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.
If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!
The amount of death terror experienced is closely related to the amount of life unlived.
If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.
The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
I must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.
To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.
Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don't leave any unlived life behind.
I believe that a different therapy must be constructed for each patient because each has a unique story.
Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair.
Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.
Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.
Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.
The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness—domains soaked in anxiety.
He had learned long ago that, in general, the easier it was for anxious patients to reach him, the less likely they were to call. (107)
If I had to pick out a therapist in a movie that I'd like to go see as a personal therapist, it would be Robin Williams in Goodwill Hunting.
...the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety. The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.
The ultimate goal of therapy... it's too hard a question. The words come to me like tranquility, like fulfillment, like realizing your potential.
A curious thought experiment. . . Nietzsche's message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally
Sometime early in life, I developed the notion - one which I have never relinquished - that writing a novel is the very finest thing a person can do.
Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.
Therapists need to have a long experience in personal therapy to see what it's like to be on the other side of the couch and see what they find helpful or not helpful.
One doesn't do existential therapy as a freestanding separate theory; rather it informs your approach to such issues as death, which many therapists tend to shy away from.
I think my quarry is illusion. I war against magic. I believe that, though illusion often cheers and comforts, it ultimately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit.
With almost every book I've written, my secret target audience is the young therapist. In this way, I am staying in my professorial role; I'm writing teaching stories and teaching novels.