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

Neither Kierkegaard nor Nietzsche had the slightest interest in starting a movement – or a new system, a thought which would indeed have offended them. Both proclaimed, in Nietzsche's phrase, Follow not me, but you!

All our feelings, like the artist's paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.

The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word Coeur, meaning "heart." Thus just as one's heart, by pumping blood to one's arms, legs, and brain enables all the other physical organs to function, so courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.

What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?

If the will remains in protest, it stays dependent on that which it is protesting against.

Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears.