Quitting smoking can be a very good test of ones character. Pass the test and you will have accomplished so much more than just get rid of one bad habit

[Concerning] the usual contempt with which an orthodox analytic group treats all outsiders and strangers ... I urge you to think of the young psychoanalysts as your colleagues, collaborators and partners and not as spies, traitors and wayward children. You can never develop a science that way, only an orthodox church.

One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.

Fear of knowing is very deeply a fear of doing.

...the great lesson is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one's daily life, in one's neighbors, friends, and family, in one's backyard.

We cannot study creativeness in an ultimate sense until we realize that practically all the definitions that we have been using of creativeness are essentially male or masculine definitions of male or masculine products. We've left out of consideration almost entirely the creativeness of women.

(Some people) have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy.