Freedom is man's capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.
I have long believed that love and will are interdependent and belong together. Both are conjunctive processes of being - a reaching out to influence others, molding, forming, creating the consciousness of the other.
A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.
Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.
The compelling drive to get at the truth is what improves us all as psychologists and is part and parcel of intellectual integrity. But I do urge that we not let the drive for honesty put blinders on us and cut off our range of vision so that we miss the very thing we set out the understand - namely, the living human being.
Freedom is the possibility of development, of enhancement of one's life - or the possibility of withdrawing, shutting oneself up, denying and stultifying one's growth.
Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.
It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move on in one's inward journey into new realms, than to stand defiantly for outer freedom. It is often easier to play the martyr, as it is to be rash in battle.
The problems of a period are the existential crises of what can be but hasn't yet been resolved; and regardless of how seriously we take that word 'resolved,' if there were not some new possibility, there would be no crisis - there would be only despair.
Freedom always deals with 'the possible'; this gives freedom its great flexibility, its fascination, and its dangers.
Loneliness is such an omnipotent and painful threat to many persons that they have little conception of the positive values of solitude and even, at times, are frightened at the prospect of being alone.
Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one's death.
Social acceptance, 'being liked,' has so much power because it holds the feelings of loneliness at bay.
Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of one's identity as a being of worth and dignity.
I make no apologies in admitting that I take very seriously the dehumanizing dangers in our tendency in modern science to make man over into the image of the machine, into the image of the techniques by which we study him.