Great Throughts Treasury

"Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is."

"However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings."

"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. (p. 100)"

"I have described the human dilemma as the capacity of man to view himself as object and as subject. My point is that both are necessary "

"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."

"I must make the important distinction between the rebel and the revolutionary. One is in ineradicable opposition to the other. The revolutionary seeks an external political change, the overthrow or renunciation of one government or ruler and the substitution of another. The origin of the term is the word revolve, literally meaning a turnover, as the revolution of a wheel. When the conditions under a given government are insufferable some groups may seek to break down that government in the conviction that any new form cannot but be better. Many revolutions, however, simply substitute one kind of government for another, the second no better than the first "

"If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick, just as your legs would wither if you never walked."

"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."

"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. Also you will have betrayed our community in failing to make your contribution to the whole."

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

"If we wish the death of our enemies, we cannot talk about the community of man."

"Imagination is the outreaching of mind... the bombardment of the conscious mind with ideas, impulses, images and every sort of psychic phenomena welling up from the preconscious. It is the capacity to dream dreams and see visions..."

"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."

"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."

"In a world where numbers inexorably take over as our means of identification, like flowing lava threatening to suffocate and fossilize all breathing life in its path; in a world where normality is defined as keeping your cool; where sex is so available that the only way to preserve any inner center is to have intercourse without committing yourself "

"In the following decades Kierkegaard remained completely unknown, Schelling"

"In any age courage is the simple virtue needed for a human being to traverse the rocky road from infancy to maturity of personality. But in an age of anxiety, an age of her morality and personal isolation, courage is a sine qua non. In periods when the mores of the society were more consistent guides, the individual was more firmly cushioned in his crises of development; but in times of transition like ours, the individual is thrown on his own at an earlier age and for a longer period."

"Increasingly in our time "

"In this sense genuine artists are so bound up with their age that they cannot communicate separated from it. In this sense, too, the historical situation conditions the creativity. For the consciousness which obtains in creativity is not the superficial level of objectified intellectualization, but is an encounter with the world on a level that undercuts the subject-object split. Creativity to rephrase our definition is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his or her world."

"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."

"Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of sense of being. Rigid moralism is a compensatory mechanism by which the individual persuades himself to take over the external sanctions because he has no fundamental assurance that his own choices have any sanction of their own"

"It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way; and we grasp more fiercely at research, statistics, and technical aids in sex when we have lost the values and meaning of love."

"Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us. Like a chemical mixture, if one of us is changed, both of us will be. Will we grow in self-actualization, or will it destroy us? The one thing we can be certain of is that if we let ourselves fully into the relationship for good or evil, we will not come out unaffected."

"It is highly significant, and indeed almost a rule, that moral courage has its source in identification through one's own sensitivity with the suffering of one's fellow human beings."

"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 interesting that the term mystic is used in this derogatory sense to mean anything we cannot segmentize and count. The odd belief prevails in our culture that a thing or experience is not real if we cannot make it mathematical, and that somehow it must be real if we can reduce it to numbers. But this means making an abstraction out of it ... Modern Western man thus finds himself in the strange situation, after reducing something to an abstraction, of having then to persuade himself it is real. ... the only experience we let ourselves believe in as real, is that which precisely is not."

"It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths."

"It is necessary for the birthing process to begin to move in its own organic time. It is necessary that the artist have this sense of timing, that he or she respect... periods of receptivity as part of the mystery of creativity and creation."

"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. Strange as it sounds, steady, patient growth in freedom is probably the most difficult task of all, requiring the greatest courage. Thus if the term hero is used in this discussion at all, it must refer not to the special acts of outstanding persons, but to the heroic element potentially in every man."

"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"

"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."

"Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and those who followed them accurately foresaw this growing split between truth and reality in Western culture, and they endeavored to call Western man back from the delusion that reality can be comprehended in an abstracted, detached way. But though they protested vehemently against arid intellectualism, they were by no means simple activists. Nor were they antirational. Anti-intellectualism and other movements in our day which make thinking subordinate to acting must not at all be confused with existentialism. Either alternative-making man subject or object-results in loosing the living, existing person."

"Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about."

"Lacking positive myths to guide him, many a sensitive contemporary man finds only the model of the machine beckoning him from every side to make himself over into its image."

"Man is the ethical animal "

"Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. It takes courage to break out of the settled mold, but most find conformity more comfortable. This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity."

"Mass communication "

"Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don't find themselves at all."

"Often when one works at a hard question, nothing good is accomplished at the first attack. Then one takes a rest, longer or shorter, and sits down anew to the work. During the first half-hour, as before, nothing is found, and then all of a sudden the decisive idea presents itself to the mind."

"Neither Kierkegaard nor Nietzsche had the slightest interest in starting a movement "

"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."

"Note the startling regularity through history with which society martyrs the rebel in one generation and worships him in the next. Socrates, Jesus, William Blake, Buddha, Krishna "

"One does not become fully human painlessly."

"Now it is no longer a matter of deciding what to do, but of deciding how to decide."

"One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him."

"Our patients are the ones who express and live out the subconscious and unconscious tendencies in the culture. The neurotic, or person suffering from what we now call character disorder, is characterized by the fact that the usual defenses of the culture do not work for him "

"On a mural Francis Scott Bradford has depicted the life of man. A heroic figure of man is painted as chained to the skyscrapers of his cities, rearing up, stretching his chains, peering onward into the stars and planets of the heavens. And the scroll inscribes the summary: "Man, though chained to earth, looks across time and space toward an unknown perfection which he may never reach but will forever seek.""

"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."

"People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage."