There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - though profoundly mistaken - definition of myth as falsehood.
By whatever name one calls it, genuine creativity is characterized by an intensity of awareness, a heightened consciousness.
Anxiety is essential to the human condition. The confrontation with anxiety can relieve us from boredom, sharpen the sensitivity and assure the presence of tension that is necessary to preserve human existence.
Apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice.
The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt.
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.
Creativity is neither the product of neurosis nor simple talent, but an intense courageous encounter with the Gods.
Purpose in the human being is a much more complex phenomenon than what used to be called will power.
The danger always exists that our technology will serve as a buffer between us and nature, a block between us and the deeper dimensions of our own experience.
What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?
Something is born, comes into being, something that did not exist before - which is as good a definition of creativity as we can get.
Mass communication--wonder as it may be technologically and something to be appreciated and valued--presents us wit a serious daner, the danger of conformism, due to the fact that we all view the same things at the same time in all the cities of the country. (p. 73)
A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.
Courage is the basic virtue for everyone so long as he continues to grow, to move ahead.
Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant.
Everyone has a need for significance; and if we can't make that possible, or even probable, in our society, then it will be obtained in destructive ways.
The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have.
I learned that healing and cure are active processes in which I myself needed to participate.
A historical perspective can also help free us from the ever-present danger -- especially at danger in the social sciences -- of absolutizing a theory or method which is actually relative to the fact that we live at a given moment in time in the development of our particular culture.
There is no authentic inner freedom that does not, sooner or later, also affect and change human history.
By the creative act, we are able to reach beyond our own death.
Creative people... are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of 'divine madness,' to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks.
Creativity occurs in an act of encounter and is to be understood with this encounter as its center.
All our feelings, like the artist's paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.
Humor is the healthy way of feeling "distance" between one's self and the problem, a way of standing off and looking at one's problem with perspective.
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