Myths give us our sense of personal identity, answering the question, 'Who am I?'
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.
Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.
The emergence of the Atomic Age brought the previously inchoate and 'free-floating' anxiety of many people into sharp focus.
Social acceptance, 'being liked,' has so much power because it holds the feelings of loneliness at bay.
Loneliness is such an omnipotent and painful threat to many persons that they have little conception of the positive values of solitude and even, at times, are frightened at the prospect of being alone.
The compelling drive to get at the truth is what improves us all as psychologists and is part and parcel of intellectual integrity. But I do urge that we not let the drive for honesty put blinders on us and cut off our range of vision so that we miss the very thing we set out the understand - namely, the living human being.
Political freedom is to be cherished indeed. But there is no political freedom that is not indissolubly bound to the inner personal freedom of the individuals who make up that nation: no liberty of a nation of conformists, no free nation made up of robots.
It may sound surprising when I say, on the basis of my own clinical practice as well as that of my psychological and psychiatric colleagues, that the chief problem of people in the middle decade of the twentieth century is emptiness.
The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
Depression is the inability to construct a future.
The cooperative, loving side of existence goes hand in hand with coping and power, but neither the one nor the other can be neglected if life is to be gratifying.
The problems of a period are the existential crises of what can be but hasn't yet been resolved; and regardless of how seriously we take that word 'resolved,' if there were not some new possibility, there would be no crisis - there would be only despair.
Freedom is the possibility of development, of enhancement of one's life - or the possibility of withdrawing, shutting oneself up, denying and stultifying one's growth.
Many modern people have gone so far in their dependence on others for their feeling of reality that they are afraid that without it they would lose the sense of their own existence.
The human dilemma is that which arises out of a man's capacity to experience himself as both subject and object at the same time.
While one might laugh at the meaningless boredom of people a decade or two ago, the emptiness has for many now moved from the state of boredom to a state of futility and despair, which holds promise of dangers.
If we are to achieve freedom, we must do so with a daring and a profundity that refuse to flinch at engaging our destiny.
Freedom always deals with 'the possible'; this gives freedom its great flexibility, its fascination, and its dangers.
I have long believed that love and will are interdependent and belong together. Both are conjunctive processes of being - a reaching out to influence others, molding, forming, creating the consciousness of the other.
