The most important step in emancipating oneself from social controls is the ability to find rewards in the events of each moment.

If you are interested in something, you will focus on it, and if you focus attention on anything, it is likely that you will become interested in it. Many of the things we find interesting are not so by nature, but because we took the trouble of paying attention to them.

The solution is to gradually become free of societal rewards and learn how to substitute for them rewards that are under one's own powers. This is not to say that we should abandon every goal endorsed by society; rather, it means that, in addition to or instead of the goals others use to bribe us with, we develop a set of our own.

Creativity is any act, idea, or product that changes an existing domain, or that transforms an existing domain into a new one What counts is whether the novelty he or she produces is accepted for inclusion in the domain.

A person who forgoes the use of his symbolic skills is never really free.

When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. They become rigid and defensive, and their self stops growing.

It is not the skills we actually have that determine how we feel but the ones we think we have.