Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.

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.

Creativity is neither the product of neurosis nor simple talent, but an intense courageous encounter with the Gods.

It is infinitely safer to know that the man at the top has his doubts, as you and I have ours, yet has the courage to move ahead in spite of these doubts.

Physical courage in whatever scene ... seems to hinge on whether the individual can feel he is fighting for others as well as himself.

The daimonic is any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person. Sex and eros, anger and rage, and the craving for power are examples. The daimonic can be either creative or destructive and is normally both.

Those we call saints rebelled against an outmoded and inadequate form of God on the basis of their new insights into divinity.

If we admit our depression openly and freely, those around us get from it an experience of freedom rather than the depression itself.

The reaction is disproportionate to the objective danger because some intrapsychic conflict is involved. Thus the reaction is never disproportionate to the subjective threat.

The battle with the gods thus hinges on our own mortality! Creativity is a yearning for immortality.

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.

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.

Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry, is aware, the form ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it.

Unconscious insights or answers to problems that come in reverie do not come hit or miss... they pertain to those areas in which the person consciously has worked laboriously and with dedication.

Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have be the same person. (p. 35).

Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears.

That because of this interplay of conscious and unconscious factors in guilt and the impossibility of legalistic blame, we are forced into an attitude of acceptance of the universal human situation and a recognition of the participation of every one of us in man's inhumanity to man.

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. He finds it necessary to remain detached enough to get meaning from the experience, but in doing so, to protect his own inner life from impoverishment.

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness.

What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?