What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

The loss of illusions and the discovery of identity, though painful at first, can be ultimately exhilarating and strengthening.

One can go back toward safety or forward toward growth.

We must understand love; we must be able to teach it, to create it, to predict it, or else the world is lost to hostility and to suspicion.

[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.

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

You must want to be first-class ...meaning the best, the very best you are capable of becoming. If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you'll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life. You will be evading your own capacities, your own possibilities.