“Every lifeline has a worth untouched—it is energy, uncolored, self-driven and supreme.”

“Beginning in infancy (or even before) each of us, in response to perceived threats to our well-being, develops a false self: a set of protective behaviors driven at root by a sense of need and lack. The essence of the false self is driven, addictive energy, consisting of tremendous emotional investment in compensatory "emotional programs for happiness," as Keating calls them.”

“As long as a self is driven by an id to a Thou, it is not a matter of love, either. In love the self is not driven by the id, but rather the self chooses the Thou.”

“It's not enough merely to exist. Every man has to seek in his own way to make his own self more noble and to relize his own true worth.”

“Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having,has a price.”

“There is a physics to the world, which non-fiction has a contract to stand in awe of, otherwise it becomes completely self-centered and ego-driven, which is the death of a memoir.”