... what the artist or creative scientist feels is not anxiety or fear; it is joy. I use the word in contrast to happiness or pleasure. The artist, at the moment of creating, does not experience gratification or satisfaction... Rather, it is joy, joy defined as the emotion that goes with heightened consciousness, the mood that accompanies the experience of actualizing one's own potentialities.

Everyone has a need for significance; and if we can't make that possible, or even probable, in our society, then it will be obtained in destructive ways.

Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line.

Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of sense of being. Rigid moralism is a compensatory mechanism by which the individual persuades himself to take over the external sanctions because he has no fundamental assurance that his own choices have any sanction of their own

Courage is the basic virtue for everyone so long as he continues to grow, to move ahead.

One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves.

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.