“New places and new roles forced me into acute awareness of how others were responding to me. When a human is being himself, flowing with his inner nature, wearing his natural appropriate masks, integrated with his environment, he is normally unaware of subtleties in another's behavior. Only if the other person breaks a conventional pattern is awareness stimulated. However, breaking my established patterns was threatening to my deeply ingrained selves and pricked me to a lvel of consciousness which is unusual, unusual since the whole instinct of human behavior is to find environments congenial to the relaxation of consciousness. By creating problems for myself I created thought.”
“If human beings were to treat one another's personal property the way they treat the natural environment, we would view that behavior as anti-social and illegal.”
“The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature.”
“No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol - cross or crescent or whatever - that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race.”
“Talents are your naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior.”
“I am not, as you will have observed, a man greatly enamored of his fellow human beings. I do not enter lightly into the foibles and whimsicalities of others, I do not suffer fools gladly, I seem able, in conversation, only to needle or be needled. My relationships, as a result, are few, and those few are tenuous, prickly sorts of arrangements, altogether lacking in the spontaneity and intimacy for which humans, I'm told, have an instinctive need. I am aware of no such instincts myself. ”