Generally, the shaking is consciously felt in its positive aspects — as the wonderful new heaven and earth which love with its miracle and mystery has suddenly produced. Love is the answer, we sing. Our Western culture seems to be engaged in a romantic - albeit desperate - conspiracy to enforce the illusion that that is all there is to eros.

What anxiety means is it's as though the world is knocking at your door, and you need to create, you need to make something, you need to do something. I think anxiety, for people who have found their own heart and their own souls, for them it is a stimulus toward creativity, toward courage. It's what makes us human beings.

Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.

When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.

Anxiety is an even better teacher than reality, for one can temporarily evade reality by avoiding the distasteful situation; but anxiety is a source of education always present because one carries it within.

When you are completely absorbed or caught up in something, you become oblivious to things around you, or to the passage of time. It is this absorption in what you are doing that frees your unconscious and releases your creative imagination.

Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable.