It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way.
It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.
Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.
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.
Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos.
It is highly significant and indeed almost a rule, that moral courage has its source in such identification through one’s own sensitivity with suffering of one’s fellow human beings.” (p. 16-17)
Courage is not a virtue or value among other personal values like love o fidelity. It is the foundations that underlies and gives reality to all other virtue and personal values. (p. 13)
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.
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.
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.
Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line.
Escapist creativity is that which lacks encounter.
By the creative act, however, we are able to reach beyond our own death. This is why creativity is so important and why we need to confront the problem of the relationship between creativity and death.
The battle with the gods thus hinges on our own mortality! Creativity is a yearning for immortality.
When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.
Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.
One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves.
But attempts to evade anxiety are not only doomed to failure. In running from anxiety you lose your most precious opportunities for the emergence of yourself, and for your education as s human being.
Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.
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…
Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don’t find themselves at all.
Opposites though they are, both solitude and solidarity are essential if the artist is to produce works that are not only significant to his or her age, but that will also speak to future generations.
I’m the problem of anxiety we must, therefore, always ask the question of what vital value is being threatened
The threat of frustration of a biological urge does not cause conflict and anxiety unless that urge is identified with some value essential to the existence of the personality.
Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it.
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. (p. 21)
A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.
One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him.
There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular – though profoundly mistaken – definition of myth as falsehood.
Courage is not a virtue or value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundations that underlies and gives reality to all other virtue and personal values. (p. 13)
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.
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.
There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change.
Courage is the basic virtue for everyone so long as he continues to grow to move ahead.
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.
Humor is the healthy way of feeling “distance” between one’s self and the problem a way of standing off and looking at one’s problems with perspective.
If the will remains in protest it stays dependent on that which it is protesting against.
If you do not express your own original ideas if you do not listen to your own being you will have betrayed yourself.
Humor is the healthy way of feeling “distance” between one’s self and the problem a way of standing off and looking at one’s problems with perspective.
Depression is the inability to construct a future.
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.
I think Dostoevsky was right that 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.
The most effective way to ensure the value of the future is to confront the present courageously and constructively.
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.
Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of one’s identity as a being of worth and dignity.
Life comes from physical survival but the good life comes from what we care about.
The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
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.
Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.
Depression is the inability to construct a future.
If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.
Life comes from physical survival but the good life comes from what we care about.
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.
Care is a state in which something does matter it is the source of human tenderness.
Freedom is man’s capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.
Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.