If mothers are told to do this or that or the other,... they lose touch with their own ability to act.... Only too easily they feel incompetent. If they must look up everything in a book, they are always too late even when they do the right things, because the right things have to be done immediately. It is only possible to act at exactly the right point when the action is intuitive or by instinct, as we say. The mind can be brought to bear on the problem afterwards.

However, it can't be helped; mothers, if they do their job properly, are the representatives of the hard, demanding world and it is they who gradually introduce reality which is so often the enemy of impulse. There is anger with mother and hatred is somewhere even when there is absolutely no doubt of love that is mixed with adoration.

Creativity consists in maintaining a key aspect of the experience of childhood throughout one's life: the capacity to create and recreate the world. Creativity is the omnipotence of the child's mind.

We fight to exist. Personally, I am not ashamed of fighting to exist. We are doing no very extraordinary thing to fight simply because we do not wish to be enslaved or exterminated.

Feeling real is more than existing; it is finding a way to exist as oneself... and to have a self into which to retreat for relaxation.

There is no such thing as a baby, there is a baby and someone.

The mother gazes at the baby in her arms, and the baby gazes at his mother's face and finds himself therein... provided that the mother is really looking at the unique, small, helpless being and not projecting her own expectations, fears, and plans for the child. In that case, the child would find not himself in his mother's face, but rather the mother's own projections. This child would remain without a mirror, and for the rest of his life would be seeking this mirror in vain.