Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.

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.

Vanity and narcissism — the compulsive need to be admired and praised — undermine one's courage, for one then fights on someone else's conviction rather than one's own.

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)

I learned that healing and cure are active processes in which I myself needed to participate.

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

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.