“Everything good is costly, and the development of the personality is one of the most costly of all things. It will cost you your innocence, your illusions, your certainty. (10)”

“It is, of course, necessary to have rules and procedures if we wish to accomplish large and complex tasks, but the question of whether or not it is worth the cost must be perennially re-examined. (117)”

“You can't make anyone love you. You just have to reveal who you are and take your chances. (105)”

“You win some, you lose some, and your losses are never made up to you. She will simply have to do without; like it or not, she must face her losses and her helplessness to undo them.”

“The therapist can interpret, advise, provide the emotional acceptance and support that nurtures personal growth, and above all, he can listen. I do not mean that he can simply hear the other, but that he will listen actively and purposefully, responding with the instrument of his trade, that is, with the personal vulnerability of his own trembling self. This listening is that which will facilitate the patient's telling of his tale, the telling that can set him free. (5)”

“This wish to satisfy someone greater than the Self, to be found acceptable, to belong at last, is a struggle familiar to many psychotherapy patients. In their lives they waste themselves on wondering how they are doing, on trying to figure out the expectations of others so that they can become someone in the eyes of others. They try to be practical, to be reasonable, to figure it all out in their heads. It is as though if only they could get the words straight in their heads, if only they could find the correct formula, then everything else in their lives would be magically straightened out. They are sure there is a right way to do things, though they have not yet found it. Someone in authority must know...It is as thought if it were discovered that two and two really did not equal four (but five), then at that moment all over the world every machine would stop operating, all of the lights would go out. (110)”

“Crises marked by anxiety, doubt, and despair have always been those periods of personal unrest that occur at the times when a man is sufficiently unsettled to have an opportunity for personal growth. We must always see our own feelings of uneasiness as being our chance for "making the growth choice rather than the fear choice.”