Quote collection
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"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."
"What Kierkegaard said about love is also true of creativity: every person must start at the beginning."
"When inward life dries up, when feeling decreases and apathy increases, when one cannot affect or even genuinely touch another person, violence flares up as a daimonic necessity for contact, a mad drive forcing touch in the most direct way possible."
"Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line."
"One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him."
"When one read's Kierkegaard's profound analyses of anxiety and despair or Nietzsche's amazingly acute insights into the dynamics of resentment and the guilt and hostility which accompany repressed emotional powers, one might pinch oneself to realize that one is reading works written in the last century and not some new contemporary psychological analysis."
"In any discussion of religion and personality integration the question is not whether religion itself makes for health or neurosis, but what kind of religion and how is it used? Freud was in error when he held that religion is per se a compulsion neurosis. Some religion is and some is not."
"The ancient Greeks, as Plato reports, believed that we discover truth through "reminiscence," that is by "remembering," by intuitively searching into our own experience."
"Our thesis is that symbols and myths are an expression of man's unique self-consciousness, his capacity to transcend the immediate concrete situation and see his life in terms of 'the possible,' and that this capacity is one aspect of his experiencing himself as a being having a world."
"Our age is one of transition, in which the normal channels for utilizing the daimonic are denied; and such ages tend to be times when the daimonic is expressed in its most destructive form."
"Physical courage in whatever scene ... seems to hinge on whether the individual can feel he is fighting for others as well as himself."
"Inner sense of worth that comes with being in love does not seem to depend essentially on whether the love is returned or not."
"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."
"Insight comes at a moment of transition between work and relaxation."
"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. Thus the sayings of the shrine, like dreams, were not to be received passively; the recipients had to "live" themselves into the message."
"I became a psychotherapist because that's where people will unburden themselves, where they will show what is in their hearts."
"We express our being by creating. Creativity is a necessary sequel to being."
"The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line."
"The creative process must be explored... as the expression of the normal people in the act of actualizing themselves."
"Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being."