The ecstatic state of wholeness is bound to be transient because it has no part in the total pattern of ‘adaptation through maladaptation’ which is characteristic of our species…the hunger of imagination, the desire and pursuit of the whole, take origin from the realization that something is missing, from awareness of incompleteness.

It's not psychopathology that counts. It's what you do with it.

It is widely believed that interpersonal relationships of an intimate kind are the chief, if not the only, source of human happiness, yet the lives of creative individuals often seem to run counter to this assumption.

All the world loves a lover, and a lover loves all the world.

Some split between the inner world and outer world is common to all behaviour, and the need to bridge the gap is the source of creative behaviour.

I want to show that the dividing lines between sanity and mental illness have been drawn in the wrong place.

What chiefly concerns and alarms many of us are the problems arising from religious fanaticism. As long as large numbers of militant enthusiasts are persuaded that they alone have access to the truth, and that the rest of us are infidels, we remain under threat. Lord Acton's famous phrase about power can be used of another danger. Dogma tends to corrupt, and absolute dogma corrupts absolutely.