Inner sense of worth that comes with being in love does not seem to depend essentially on whether the love is returned or not.

To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive - to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before

Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously.

Tenderness emerges from the fact that the two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we are all heir because we are individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not of two isolated selves but a union

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. (p. 100)

Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell.

Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have be the same person. (p. 35)