While it is necessary to eat and therefore it is pleasantest to eat food that looks handsome and tastes good, on the other hand there are things I would far rather do than spend time in a kitchen.

In order to plan your future wisely, it is necessary that you understand and appreciate your past.

A cruel joke has been played on us. We are fated always to remember what we learned but never to recall the experiences that taught us. Who can remember being born? Yet, it is possible to speculate that anxiety has its roots in this experience, that dread of abandonment, fears of separation, intolerable loneliness go back to this moment. Who can remember being cared for as an infant? ... Who can remember being toilet-trained? ... Who can remember the attachment which developed to the parent of the opposite sex? ... We cannot remember but what we have forgotten lives on dynamically.

What nonsense it is, this desire to be without limitations, this wish always to be seen in the most flattering light. We are anxious, not because we think so little of ourselves, but because we think so much of ourselves. We are anxious, not that we may appear in the worst light, but that we may not appear in the best light. Anxiety is born of self-consciousness, and it is alleviated to the exact extent that we can drop consciousness of the self.

You do not need to be loved, not at the cost of yourself. The single relationship that is truly central and crucial in a life is the relationship to the self.

There is no way of steering successfully between a failed situation and a failed self except by stopping and taking our bearings.

Most people ask of their friends that they understand them, but, on balance, I think I prefer a friend who understands himself.