Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration.

Dogmatism of all kinds--scientific, economic, moral, as well as political--are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyer of our nicely ordered systems. (p. 76)

Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies.

Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.

We receive love — from our children as well as others — not in proportion to our demands or sacrifices or needs, but roughly in proportion to our own capacity to love.

The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line.

It is amazing how many hints and guides and intuitions for living come to the sensitive person who has ears to hear what his body is saying.