Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.

... 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.

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

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

Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don't find themselves at all.

What Kierkegaard said about love is also true of creativity: every person must start at the beginning.

Freedom does not come automatically; it is achieved. And it is not gained in a single bound; it must be achieved each day.