About the Existential Quotes: This page lists many influential existential quotes, along with some of my favorites. It is a work in progress, so this will probably be regularly updated over time. Hopefully, this will help tantalize readers into seeking out some of the books. For older quotes, with some resistance, I have elected to follow APA style and leave gendered language that today would be written in gender-neutral language. The reference information for quotes is linked and/or in the references section of this website. Although this site is owned by Louis Hoffman, this site supports the Rocky Mountain Humanistic Counseling and Psychological Association (RMHCPA), which is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. As an Amazon Associate RMHCPA earns from qualifying purchases made through the links below.

“Compassion on the part of the therapist is the essence of any psychotherapy which deserves the name.”
~ Rollo May, Freedom & Destiny, p. 231

“A good doctor, who we all know to be a good person, will therefore always call himself back from objectivity to humanity.”
~ Viktor E. Frankl (2021) Yes to Life: In Spirte of Everything (p. 69)

“The process of liberation of man, independently of the concrete situations in which he finds himself, includes and concerns the whole of humanity.”
~ Frantz Fanon, 1964/1967, Toward the African Revolution, p. 144

“Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have been the same person.”
~ Rollo May, 1975, The Courage to Create, p. 35

“I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.”
~ Albert Camus, 1955, The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays, p. 4

“Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.”
~ Ernest Becker, 1973, The Denial of Death, p. 196

“…only the philosophical question is perennial, not the answers.”
~ Paul Tillich, 1957, The Dynamics of Faith, p. 94

“What is the ideal for mental health, then? A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life, death, and reality; one honest enough to follow its own commandments: I mean, not to kill, not to take the lives of others to justify itself.”
~ Ernest Becker, 1973, The Denial of Death, p. 204

“…hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like the roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.”
~ Lu Xun, 1921/1959, “My Old Home” (In Lu Xun Selected Works, Vol. 1, p. 101)

“I finally went to a concentration camp for the first time in my life last August… I wanted to do that, and am glad I did. It was a very powerful experience. It sort of felt like paying one’s existential dues… That if you are going to be alive in the 20th century or 21st century, that you are going to claim to be alive and had lived in that time, then what should you be aware of, or in touch with?… There’s a whole bunch of existential facts that one ought to really… embrace, or acknowledge, even feel existential guilt about.”
~ Tom Greening, 2010, (cited in On Becoming an Existential Psychologist: Journeys of Contemporary Leaders by Trent Claypool [dissertation]), p.

“…the purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.”
~ Rollo May, 1981, Freedom and Destiny, p. 19

“…no people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.”
~ James Baldwin, 1955, Notes of a Native Son, p. 143

“But a people unable to reform will not be able to preserve its old culture either.”
~ Lu Xun, 1925/1961, (“Sudden Notions” in Lu Xun Selected Works, Vol. 1), p. 138

“…no existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself.”
~ Simone de Beauvoir, 1948, The Ethics Of Ambiguity, p. 67

“Thus, human existence–at least as long as it has not been neurotically distorted–is always directed to something, or someone, other than itself, be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter lovingly.
~ Viktor E. Frankl, 2000, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, p. 84

“Self-acceptance too often is intertwined with attempts to rationalize ourselves as being right or justified in our mistakes instead of embracing our humanity as imperfect creatures. Authentic self-acceptance requires that we are honest with ourselves about responsibility. Instead of seeking to justify our mistakes, we embrace them.”
~ Louis Hoffman, 2014, A Cultural Crisis of Responsibility: Responding to a Denial of Our Humanity

“It takes culture to create self and self to create culture… There is no self except in interaction with a culture, and no culture that is not made up of selves.”
~ Rollo May, 1982, “The Problem of Evil: An Open Letter to Carl Rogers” https://doi.org/10.1177/0022167882223003

“The therapist, whose only purpose is to get rid of resistance, mistakes the meaning of this universal phenomenon and the values to be had from working with resistance. That process is the central feature of any true ‘depth’ psychotherapy. It is very often the case that when the client’s resistance is manifest, an opportunity is presented to get more core issues than when there is unstressed exchange.”
~ James F. T. Bugental, Psychotherapy Isn’t What You Think, p. 131

“…the individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and to other individuals; he exists only by transcending himself, and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others. He justifies his existence by a movement which, like freedom, springs from his heart but which leads outside of himself.”
~ Simone de Beauvoir, 1948, The Ethics Of Ambiguity, p. 156

“We cannot be free until they are free.”
~ James Baldwin, 1962, The Fire Next Time (p. 10). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

“Freedom without compassion is demoniacal. Without compassion, freedom can be self-righteous, inhuman, self-centered, and cruel.”
~ Rollo May, 1981, Freedom and Destiny, p. 230

“Roger, what I wanted to tell you is that death is always with us and that what matters is not to know whether we can escape it but whether we have achieved the maximum for the ideas we have made our own…. We are nothing on earth if we are not in the first place the slaves of a cause, the cause of the people, the cause of justice and liberty. I want you to know that even when the doctors had given me up, in the gathering dusk I was still thinking of the Algerian people, of the peoples of the Third World, and when I have persevered it was for their sake.”
~ Frantz Fanon, from Frantz Fannon: Colonialism and Alienation (Renate Zahar, Ed.), p. xx

“Before embarking on a positive voice, freedom needs to make an effort at disalienation.”
~ Frantz Fanon, 1952/2008, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 206

“One cannot give an Other his freedom, only his liberty.”
~ Lewis R. Gordon, 1995, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences, p. 69

“if we suppose… a society where sexual equality is concretely realized, this equality would newly assert itself in each individual.”
~ Simone de Beauvoir, 1941/2011, The Second Sex p. 761

“You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free.”
~ James Baldwin, 1962 The Fire Next Time, p. 10

“Instinct, lifted into the ego sphere by consciousness is the power of will, and at the same time a tamed, directed, controlled instinct, which manifests itself freely within the individual personality, that is, creatively.”
~ Otto Rank, 1929/1978, Truth and Reality, p. 24

“Our [African American] children are not at-risk; they are at-potential in at-risk environments. Such intentional language places human experiences in a relational context that requires one to ask the question, what happened to you? and not what is wrong with you?”
~ Theopia Jackson, 2019, (Chapter 4 in Humanistic Approaches to Multiculturalism and Diversity), p. 39

“It is highly significant and indeed almost a rule, that moral courage has its source in such identification through one’s own sensitivity with suffering of one’s fellow human beings.”
~ Rollo May, 1975, The Courage to Create, pp. 16-17

“But in order to change a situation one has first to see it for what it is…”
~ James Baldwin, 1962, The Fire Next Time, p. 81

“For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”
~ Viktor E. Frankl, 1984, Man’s Search for Meaning (3rd ed), p. 12

”

And there is certainly joy in life too, but it cannot be pursued, cannot be ‘willed into being’ as joy; rather, it must arise spontaneously, and in fact, it does arise spontaneously, just as an outcome may arise: Happiness should not, must not, and can never be a goal, but only an outcome…”
~ Viktor E. Frankl (2021). Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything, p. 32

Frankl, Viktor E.. Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything (p. 32). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.

“A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence. Whether the meaning of existence is only what we put into life by our own individual fortitude, as Sartre would hold, or whether there is a meaning we need to discover, as Kierkegaard would state, the result is the same: myths are our way of finding this meaning and significance.”
~ Rollo May, 1991, The Cry for Myth, p. 15

“There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular – though profoundly mistaken – definition of myth as falsehood.”
~ Rollo May, 1991, The Cry for Myth, p. 23

“Myth opens the door to a world that cannot be predicted and controlled, where truth is more amorphous, multifaceted, relative, pluralistic.”
~ David N. Elkins, Beyond Religion, p. 193

“…when a story survives in folklore, it expresses in some way a region of the ‘local soul.'”
~ Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1952/2008, p. 46

“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.”
~ Rollo May, 1975, The Courage to Create, p. 21

“Our greatest challenge today is to couple conviction with doubt. By conviction, I mean some pragmatically developed faith, trust, or centeredness; and by doubt I mean openness to the ongoing changeability, mystery, and fallibility of the conviction.”
~ Kirk Schneider, 1999, The Paradoxical Self, p. 7

“I call a lie: wanting not to see something one does see, wanting not to see something as one sees it… The most common lie is the lie one tells to oneself; lying to others is relatively the exception.”
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, 1894/1990, The Anti-Christ (R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.), p. 185

“I have said that the curse weighing on marriage is that individuals too often join together in their weakness and not in their strength, that each one asks of the other rather than finding pleasure in giving. Simone de Beauvoir, 1949/2011, The Second Sex, p. 566

“…we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love–first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.”
~ Albert Camus, 1972, A Happy Death (R. Howard, Trans.), p. 116

“The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man’s condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence.”
~ Simone de Beauvoir, 1948, The Ethics Of Ambiguity, p. 129

“What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms. Logos is deeper than logic.”
~ Viktor E. Frankl, 1959/1984, Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 122

“People have two basic concerns: One is to survive; one is to exist. The former only asks to go on living; the latter asks for meaning. The former concerns itself with how to live, the latter with why to live, the meaning of living.
~ Xuefu Wang, 2019, The Symbol of the Iron House: From Survivalism to Existentialism. In Existential Psychology East-West (Vol. 2), p. 7.

“…meaning in life is limited and unsustainable without reaching out for something greater and higher than self-interest.”
~ Paul T. P. Wong, 2010, “Meaning therapy: An integrative and positive existential psychotherapy” (Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, 40, 85-93).

“Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.”
~ Albert Camus, 1955, The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays, p. 167

“Our true identity is a process, not a substantive thing. Thus we are continually changing. The effort to remain unchanging is crippling and results in a smaller life.”
~ James F. T. Bugental, 1990, Intimate Journeys, p. 326

“Nobody has a monopoly on truth, neither the leader nor the militant. The search for truth in local situations is the responsibility of the community.”
~ Frantz Fanon, 1963/2004, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 139

“Dogmatism of all kinds–scientific, economic, moral, as well as political–are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyer of our nicely ordered systems.”
~ Rollo May, 1975, The Courage to Create, p. 76

“Our old way of thinking–that problems are to be gotten rid of as soon as possible–overlooks the most important thing of all: that problems are a normal way of thinking–that problems are to be gotten rid of as soon as possible–overlooks the most important thing of all: that problems are a normal aspect of living and are basic to human creativity. This is true whether one is constructing things or reconstructing oneself. Problems are the outward signs of unused inner possibilities.”
~ Rollo May, Freedom & Destiny, p. 20

“it must be repeated again that within the human collectivity nothing is natural, and woman, among others, is a product developed by civilization…”
~ Simone de Beauvoir, 1949/2011, The Second Sex, p. 761

“It is a common saying nowadays that racism is a plague of humanity. But we must not content ourselves with such a phrase. We must tirelessly look for the repercussions of racism at all levels of sociability.”
~ Frantz Fanon, 1964/1967 Toward the African Revolution, p. 53

“If someone told me that I could live my life again free of depression provided I was willing to give up the gifts depression has given me–the depth of awareness, the expanded consciousness, the increased sensitivity, the awareness of limitation, the tenderness of love, the meaning of friendship, the appreciation of life, the joy of a passionate heart–I would say, ‘This is a Faustian bargain! Give me my depressions. Let the darkness descend. But do not take away the gifts that depression, with the help of some unseen hand, has dredged up from the deep ocean of my soul and strewn along the shores of my life. I can endure darkness if I must; but I cannot live without these gifts. I cannot live without my soul.'”
~ David N. Elkins, Beyond Religion, p. 188

“I do not believe that we ‘cure’ or ‘heal’ anything or anybody. I do believe that the power to make the changes that are needed resides in the client, not the therapist. Trying to ‘cure’ with ‘insight,’ usually insight offered by therapist interpretation, does little to change or relieve the problem or distress.”
~ James F. T. Bugental, 1990, Intimate Journeys, p. 56-57

“I smile when I note, in conversation with some of my so-called optimistic friends, that when we get down to fundamental issues such as the possibilities of atomic war or the coming food crunch, or the fact that this planet itself will in all probability be wiped out in a finite number of years, their optimism turns out to be a reaction formation to their hopelessness; and I turn out to be more hopeful than they. This is becasue, it seems to me, one needs a philosophy for oneself that can stand regardless of failure in our actions or temporary despair.”
~ Rollo May, 1982, “The Problem of Evil: An Open Letter to Rollo May”
https://doi.org/10.1177/0022167882223003

“We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.”
~ James Baldwin, 1962 The Fire Next Time, p. 91

“…despair is suffering without meaning.”
~ Viktor E. Frankl, 2000, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, p. 133

“When you put sugar into bitter tea, the amount of bitterness remains the same, it only tastes a little better than without any sugar at all.”
~ Lu Xun (2000), Letters Between Two

“Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of sense of being. Rigid moralism is a compensatory mechanism by which the individual persuades himself to take over the external sanctions because he has no fundamental assurance that his own choices have any sanction of their own.”
~ Rollo May, 1958, “Contributions of Existential Psychotherapy” in Existence, p. 45

“Frequently the analysis and appraisal of a given event prove inadequate and the conclusions paradoxical, precisely because the organic links between the particular event and the historic development of the surrounding whole have not been sufficiently taken into account.”
~ Frantz Fanon, 1964/1967, Toward the African Revolution, p. 114

“those who talk so much about “equality in difference” would be hard put not to grant me that there are differences in equality.”
~ Simone de Beauvoir, 1949/2011, The Second Sex, p. 765

“Our age is one of transition, in which the normal channels for utilizing the daimonic are denied; and such ages tend to be times when the daimonic is expressed in its most destructive form.”
~ Rollo May, 1969, Love and Will, p. 130

“Furthermore, I have met only a very few people—and most of these were not Americans—who had any real desire to be free. Freedom is hard to bear. It can be objected that I am speaking of political freedom in spiritual terms, but the political institutions of any nation are always menaced and are ultimately controlled by the spiritual state of that nation. We are controlled here by our confusion, far more than we know, and the American dream has therefore become something much more closely resembling a nightmare, on the private, domestic, and international levels.”
~ James Baldwin, 1962 The Fire Next Time, p. 88-89

“Existential angst permeates our society. It is in our art, music, literature, movies, and plays: it is behind the increasing rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide; it is the ennui and the sense of hopelessness that threaten to swallow our children.”
~ David N. Elkins, 1998, Beyond Religion, p. 62

“It is absolutely impossible for a subject to see or have insight into something while leaving itself out of the picture, so impossible that knowing and being are the most opposite of all spheres.”
~ Nietzsche, 1873/1962, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, p. 83

“Science, as explanation and prediction, accordingly, does not develop in abstract space. The ideas, interests, theories and definition of science exist in a human world; and, human experiences are influenced, if not governed, by culture.”
~ Wade Nobles, 2006, Seeking the Sakhu, p. 74

“…less and less is life animated through personal discovery, intimacy with others, or self-reflection. While life has become more manageable for many people, it has become commensurately less engaged.”
~ Kirk Schneider, 2004, Rediscovery of Awe, p. 20

“The greatest cause of evil included all human motives in one giant paradox. Good and bad were so inextricably mixed that we couldn’t make them out; bad seemed to lead to good, and good motives led to bad. The paradox is that evil comes from man’s urge to heroic victory over evil.”
~ Ernest Becker (1975), Escape from Evil, p. 135-136

“…there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.”
~ William James, 1902/1997, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 140

“Yes, the culture admittedly has powerful effects upon us. But it could not have these effects were these tendencies not already present in us, for… we constitute the culture. When we project our tendencies toward evil on the culture–as we do when we repress the daimonic–the evil becomes the culture’s fault, not ours. Then we don’t experience the blow to our narcissism that owning our evil would entail.”
~ Rollo May, 1982, “The Problem of Evil: An Open Letter to Carl Rogers.” https://doi.org/10.1177/0022167882223003

“Therefore, it is we who are responsible for much of the evil in the world; and we are each morally required to accept rather than project that ponderous responsibility-lest we prefer instead to wallow in a perennial state of powerless, frustrated, furious, victimhood. For what one possesses the power to bring about, one has also the power to limit, mitigate, counteract, or transmute.”
~ Stephen A. Diamond, 1996, Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic, p. 85

“All oppression creates a state of war.”
~ Simone de Beauvoir,1949/2011 The Second Sex, p.754

“To believe that one has a higher reason to take human life, to feel that torture and murder are in the service of a divine cause is the kind of mandate that has always given sadists everywhere the purest fulfillment: they are free to remain on the level of the body, to pillage real flesh and blood creatures, to transact in lives in the service of the highest power.”
~ Ernest Becker, 1971, Birth and Death of Meaning (p. 197). Free Press.

“The citizens of a city are not guilty of the crimes committed in their city; but they are guilty as participants in the destiny of [humanity] as a whole and in the destiny of their city in particular; for their acts in which freedom was united with destiny have contributed to the destiny in which they participate. They are guilty, not of committing the crimes of which their group is accused, but of contributing to the destiny in which these crimes happened.”
~ Paul Tillich, 1957, Systematic Theology (Vol. 2), p. 58

“It’s hard to inspire change if we fail to encounter guilt.”
~ Kirk Schneider, The Spirituality of Awe: Challenges to the Robotic Revolution (Revised Edition) (p. 30).

“The essence of revolution is not the struggle for bread; it is the struggle for human dignity. Certainly this includes bread.”
~ Adolfo Gilly, In “Introduction” 1959/1965, A Dying Colonialism, p. 12

“In the beginning, we create the enemy. Before the weapon comes the image. We think others to death and then invent the battle-axe or ballistic missiles with which to actually kill them. Propaganda precedes technology.”
~ Sam Keen, 1991, “The Enemy Maker” (in C. Zweig & J. Abrams, Meeting the Shadow), p. 198

“Generally, the more anxious and insecure we are, the more we invest in these symbolic extensions of ourselves. In the United States today, ridden by social change and crisis, “desecrating the flag” has become a major offense. It is not that the flag has risen in value, but that the selves are more anxious about their own. In all these cases we see grown and healthy organisms being jerked off balance by their symbolic extensions.”
~ Ernest Becker, 1971, Birth and Death of Meaning (p. 33). Free Press.

“…man’s natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.”
~ Ernest Becker (1975), Escape from Evil, p. xviii

“No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.”
~ Nietzsche, 1892/1966, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (W. Kaufmann, Trans.), p. 18

“If you only care about how to live and pay no attention how to live, you may fall into one of two polarized models of life. The first seeks the temporary peace of avoidance: ‘better a live dog than a dead lion.’ The second lives for a sort of impoverished extravagance, thing pleasure at every opportunity, nothing but “hakuna matata.’ The former can see no meaning; the latter mistakes pleasure for meaning.”
~ Xuefu Wang, 2019, The Symbol of the Iron House: From Survivalism to Existentialism. In Existential Psychology East-West (Vol. 2), p. 10

“I am not predicting doom. But I am stating that if we ignore evil, we will move closer to doom, and the growth and triumph of evil may well result.”
~ Rollo May, 1982, “The Problem of Evil: An Open Letter to Carl Rogers” https://doi.org/10.1177/0022167882223003

“…you have to reform yourself before reforming society and the world.”
~ Lu Xun, 1919/1961 (“Random Thoughts – Dying in Bitterness,” in Lu Xun Selected Works, Vol. 2), p. 52

“Instead of being hypnotized by the enemy we need to begin looking at the eyes with which we see the enemy… We need to become conscious of…”the shadow.” The heroes and leaders toward peace in our time will be those men and women who have the courage to plunder into the darkness at the bottom of the personal and corporate psyche and face the enemy within. Depth psychology has presented us with the undeniable wisdom that the enemy is constructed from denied aspects of the self.
~ Sam Keen, 1991, “The Enemy Maker” (in C. Zweig & J. Abrams, Meeting the Shadow), p. 198-199

“Depth psychotherapy is, and needs to be, the careful and detailed review of how one carries out the task the universe has given each of us: to create our own unique pattern for being alive.”
~ James F. T. Bugental, 1990, Intimate Journeys, p. 56

“To look and to listen to a patient and to see “signs” of schizophrenia as a “disease” and to look and listen to him simply as a human being are to see and to hear in … radically different ways…”
~ R. D. Laing, The Divided Self, p. 33

“Even the mentally ill person ‘is’ not just a disease to us but is first and foremost a human being, that is, a person who ‘has’ an illness.
~ Viktor E. Frankl (2021). Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything (p. 69)

“Therapists need to be able to perceive and admit their own evil–hostility, aggressiveness, anger–if they are to be able to see and accept these experiences in clients.”
~ Rollo May, 1982, “The Problem of Evil: An Open Letter to Carl Rogers” https://doi.org/10.1177/0022167882223003

“Gods and goddesses, also, are personifications of principles; while theologians and philosophers often remind us that the word God points to a mystery so deep that it can never be captured in human form, most of us continue to personify God.”
~ David N. Elkins, 1998, Beyond Religion, p. 1999

“. . . the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith…”
~ Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, 1973, p. 68

“If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”
~ James Baldwin, 1962 The Fire Next Time (p. 47). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

“The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is secure enough, fixed enough for it.”
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, 1889/1990, Twilight of the Idols (R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.), p. 85

“In those who rest on their unshakable faith, pharisaism and fanaticism are the unmistakable symptoms of doubt which has been repressed. Doubt is not overcome by repression but by courage. Courage does not deny that there is doubt, but it takes the doubt into itself as an expression of its own finitude and affirms the content of an ultimate concern. Courage does not need the safety of an unquestionable conviction. It includes the risk without which no creative life is possible.”
~ Paul Tillich, 1957, The Dynamics of Faith, p. 101

“The gift above all others that my clients have given me is the conviction that there is always more; that courage, persistence, and determination can always open possibilities where none has seemed to exist.”
~ James F. T. Bugental, 1990, Intimate Journeys, p. 321

“As a psychoanalyst I must help my patient to “consciousnessize” his unconscious, to no longer be tempted by a hallucinatory lactification, but also to act along the lines of a change in social structure.”
~ Frantz Fannon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1952/2008, p. 80

“There comes a time when silence becomes dishonesty.”
~ Frantz Fanon, 1964-1967, Toward the African Revolution, p. 54

“I can negate everything of that part of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion. I can refute everything in this world surrounding me that offends or enraptures me, except this chaos, this sovereign chance and this divine equivalence which springs from anarchy. I don’t know whether this world has meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms.”
~ Albert Camus, 1955, The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays, p. 51

“I would say that our patients never really despair because of any suffering in itself! Instead, their despair stems in each instance from a doubt as to whether suffering is meaningful. Man is ready and willing to shoulder any suffering as soon and as long as he can see a meaning in it.”
~ Viktor Frankl, 1961, Logotherapy and the Challenge of Suffering,
In Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, Volume 1, p. 5

“I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering…. but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.”
~ James Baldwin, 1962, The Fire Next Time (p. 98). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

“One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him.”
~ Rollo May, 1958, “Contributions of Existential Psychotherapy” in Existence, p. 39

“Though love is instinctive, it cannot develop without a certain stimulus and use.”
~ Lu Xun, 1925/1961 (“Guafuism” in Lu Xun Selected Works, Vol. 2), p. 214

“The road to a fuller, more vital identity… is to help clients embody their underlying fears and anxieties, to help them attune, at the deepest levels, to the nature of those issues, and in so doing, to help them respond to, as opposed to react against, those issues.”
~ Kirk J. Schneider (1998) “Existential Processes” (in Handbook of Experiential Psychotherapy by Greenberg, Watson, & Lietaer), p. 104

“I wince to think of how much time has been wasted by intelligent men and women arguing about whether psychotherapy cures and trying to fit psychotherapy into the mode of Western nineteenth-century medicine. Our task is to be guide, friend, and interpreter to persons on their journeys through their private hells and purgatories.”
~ Rollo May, 1991, The Cry for Myth, p. 165

“When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.”
~ Rollo May, 1958, The Origins of the Existential Movement in Psychology, in Existence, p. 27

“…the client will not seek nor likely find “answers” to life issues. Instead, the issues themselves will change; their boundaries will become more permeable; possibilities will be disclosed that simply were not accessible before.”
~ James F. T. Bugental, 1999, Psychotherapy Isn’t What You Think, p. 55

“One must not let oneself be misled: they say ‘Judge not!’ but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way.”
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, 1894/1990, The Anti-Christ (R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.), p. 170

“Symptoms, by their very nature, imply over-compressed living space. To satisfy a subconscious need for safety, a person will practically seal themselves in a narrow space in which safety is everything and growth is ignored.”
~ Xuefu Wang, 2019, The Symbol of the Iron House: From Survivalism to Existentialism. In Existential Psychology East-West (Vol. 2), p. 12

“There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules.”
~ Albert Camus, 1955, The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays, p. 67

“intellectual alienation is a creation of bourgeois society. And for me bourgeois society is any society that becomes ossified in a predetermined mold, stifling any development, progress, or discovery. For me bourgeois society is a closed society where it’s not good to be alive, where the air is rotten and ideas and people are putrefying. And I believe that a man who takes a stand against this living death is in a way a revolutionary.”
~ Frantz Fanon, 1952/2008, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 199

“…that because of this interplay of conscious and unconscious factors in guilt and the impossibility of legalistic blame, we are forced into an attitude of acceptance of the universal human situation and a recognition of the participation of every one of us in man’s inhumanity to man.”
~ Rollo May, 1961, The Meaning of the Oedipus Myth
In Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, Volume 1, p. 50

“Today we understand that guilt is due to the human condition, to the sense of being bound, overshadowed, feeling powerless.”
~ Ernest Becker, 1971, Birth and Death of Meaning (p. 63). Free Press

“Thus guilt and responsibility are forward-looking, saying that we still have the power within us to act further and produce better outcomes. In this sense, opportunity is the other face of responsibility.”
~ James F. T. Bugental, 1990, Intimate Journeys, p. 74

“Viewed from an existential standpoint, questions of choice, freedom and responsibility cannot be isolated or contained within some separate being (such as ‘self’ or ‘other’). In the inescapable interrelationship that exists between ‘a being’ and ‘the world’, each impacts upon and implicates the other, each is defined through the other and, indeed, each ‘is’ through the existence of the other. Viewed in this way, no choice can be mine or yours alone, no experienced impact of choice can be separated in terms of ‘my responsibility’ versus ‘your responsibility’, no sense of personal freedom can truly avoid its interpersonal dimensions.”
~ Ernesto Spinelli, 2001, The Mirror and the Hammer: Challenges to Therapeutic Orthodoxy, p. 16

“The development of mind, then, is a progressive freedom of reactivity. The reactive process which is inherent in the organism not only gradually arrives at freedom from the intrinsic properties of things but also proceeds from there to assign its own stimulus meanings. Mind culminates in the organism’s ability to choose what it will react to.”
~ Ernest Becker, 1971, Birth and Death of Meaning (p. 7). Free Press.

“Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos.”
~ Rollo May, 1985, My Quest for Beauty, p. 155

‎”The most important thing… was to change their spirit; and since at that time I felt that literature was the best means to this end, I decided to promote literary movement.”
~ Lu Xun, 1922/1959, from the preface to A Call to Arms, (in Lu Xun Selected Works, Vol. 1, p. 35).

“Without awareness, we are not truly alive.”
~ James F. T. Bugental, 1999, Psychotherapy Isn’t What You Think, p. 257

“What we are talking about here is an alternative way of knowing. Communication is an effort to overcome the subject-object split and to open ourselves to the oneness and interconnectedness of all things. Frankly, most Westerners do not know how to do this. We have been shaped by a culture that idealizes objectivity and denigrates subjectivity. Consequently, we are estranged from our own inner experience and cannot rely on it as a way of knowing the world.”
~ David N. Elkins, 1998, Beyond Religion, p. 219

“But anyone who thinks themselves genuinely unbiased is bound to be taken in.”
~ Lu Xun, 1926/1961 (“On Seeing Off the Kitchen God” in Lu Xun Selected Works, Vol. 2), p. 253

“For the colonized subject, objectivity is always directed against him.”
~ Frantz Fanon, 1963/2004, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 37

“Self-awareness or self-consciousness can lead to the enlarging of consciousness. It can lead to the expansion of control of one’s life. Self-awareness involves the capacity of not only looking back, but also looking ahead. Self-awareness is not only a gift, but it is a responsibility.”
~ Mufti James Hannush
“The Development of the Self in the Light of the Existential-Humanistic Psychology of Rollo May” In Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, Volume 24, 1999, pp. 75-76

“The self is not physical, it is symbolic.”
~ Ernest Becker, 1971, Birth and Death of Meaning (p. 31). Free Press.

“I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.”
~ Viktor E. Frankl, 1959/1984, Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 134

“Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness.”
~ Rollo May, 1975, The Courage to Create, p. 100

“…how hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for!… There can be no peace without hope.”
~ Albert Camus, 1948, The Plague (Trans. Stuart Gilbert), p. 262-263

“Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.”
~ Simone de Beauvoir, 1965, A Very Easy Death, p. 92

“The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die.”
~ Simone de Beauvoir, 1965, A Very Easy Death, p. 60

“Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.”
~ Simone de Beauvoir, 1948, The Ethics Of Ambiguity, p. 120

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.
~ James Baldwin, 1962, The Fire Next Time  (pp. 91-92). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

“The self-system, in this sense, is an ideational, linguistic device, in a continual state of modification and creation. We sit comfortably in our armchairs pouring forth conventional symbolic abstractions. In this shadowy monotone we exercise and modify our fragile selves, while our pet cat sits purringly by, convinced probably that we are only purring too.”
~ Ernest Becker, 1971, Birth and Death of Meaning (p. 92). Free Press.

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”
~ Albert Camus, 1955, The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays, p. 3

“…man is free, in so far as he has the power of contradicting himself and his essential nature. Man is free even from his freedom; that is, he can surrender his humanity.”
~ Paul Tillich, 1957, Systematic Theology (Vol. 2), p. 32

“A truly human psychotherapy must celebrate the uniqueness of humankind and of each human individual.”
~ James F. T. Bugental, 1999, Psychotherapy Isn’t What You Think, p. 61

“…it is the humanness in the doctor that first discovers the human in the patient.”
~ Viktor E. Frankl (2021) Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything, p. 69

“In humanistic psychotherapy, empathy is more than a technique or foundation for establishing a good therapeutic alliance, it is healing in and of itself.”
~ Louis Hoffman, 2019, “Culture and Empathy in Humanistic Psychology” in Humanistic Approaches to Multiculturalism and Diversity, p. 111

“To me, being existential means putting the fact of life itself-that is, existence-as the foremost matter for psychological attention. The humanistic adjective (that is, existential-humanistic) attests to our putting human well-being and the actualization of human potential as our highest value.”
~ James F. T. Bugental, 1990, Intimate Journeys, p. 12

“A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison.”
~ Simone de Beauvoir, 1948, The Ethics Of Ambiguity, p. 91

“No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so.”
~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 85

“No one can be truly liberated until all are liberated.”
~ James H. Cone, 1997, God of the Oppressed, p. 135

“Furthermore, I have met only a very few people—and most of these were not Americans—who had any real desire to be free. Freedom is hard to bear. It can be objected that I am speaking of political freedom in spiritual terms, but the political institutions of any nation are always menaced and are ultimately controlled by the spiritual state of that nation. We are controlled here by our confusion, far more than we know, and the American dream has therefore become something much more closely resembling a nightmare, on the private, domestic, and international levels.
~ James Baldwin, 1962, The Fire Next Time (pp. 88-89). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

“It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength.
~ James Baldwin, 1955, Notes of a Native Son (pp. 114-116).

“All power is in essence power to deny mortality.”
~ Ernest Becker (1975), Escape from Evil, p. 81

“In every society, in every community, there exists, must exist, a channel, an outlet, whereby the energy accumulated in the form of aggressiveness can be released.”
~ Frantz Fanon, 1952/2008, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 124

“…convictions might be more dangerous enemies of the truth than lies.”
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, 1894/1990, The Anti-Christ (R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.), p. 185

“All who have read a few old books have picked up the old tactics of considering every new idea a ‘heresy’ which must be rooted out.”
~ Lu Xun, 1926/1961 (“The Classics and the Vernacular” in Lu Xun Selected Works, Vol. 2), p. 246

“those who have an interest in perpetuating the present always shed tears for the marvelous past about to disappear without casting a smile on the young future.”
~ Simone de Beauvoir, 1949/2011, The Second Sex, p. 764

“Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth…. Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall of relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things.”
~ Nietzsche, 1873/1962, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, p. 83

“Our thesis is that symbols and myths are an expression of man’s unique self-consciousness, his capacity to transcend the immediate concrete situation and see his life in terms of ‘the possible,’ and that this capacity is one aspect of his experiencing himself as a being having a world.”
~ Rollo May, 1961, “The Meaning of the Oedipus Myth”
In Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, Volume 1, p. 44

“Anthropologists were never very popular at stuffy gatherings because they had a way of puncturing self-righteousness: for almost every timeless truth that one thought dear to the human heart, the anthropologist would name a tribe or a people who did not hold that truth dear—who may even have scorned it. Cultural relativity is a pitiless weapon precisely because it sets our hero-systems up on end. It takes our ideals and mocks them—even worse, it takes our ideas of what is normal, everyday behavior and it undermines them.”
~ Ernest Becker, 1971, Birth and Death of Meaning (p. 130). Free Press. Kindle Edition.

“Science is the creation by humans of a particular paradigm and methodology for discovering truth and understanding reality. Hence it can never fully reflect the hidden face of humanity, its creator, in the same sense that a computer can never become fully human or know what it means to be human: however sophisticated, these machines will forever remain mere artifacts of humanity.”
~ Stephen A. Diamond, 1996, Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic, p. 179

“Though science has given us many marvels, it has also spoiled many of our pleasant dreams.”
~ Lu Xun, 1925/1961 (“Idle Thoughts at the End of Spring” in Lu Xun Selected Works, Vol. 2), p. 142

“Awe is not a very comfortable standpoint for many people… Hence, all about us today, we see avoidance of awe-by burying ourselves in materialist science, for example or in absolutist religious positions; or by locking ourselves into systems, whether corporate, familial, or consumerist; or by stupefying ourselves with drugs.”
~ Kirk Schneider, 2004, Rediscovery of Awe, p. xiii

“Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies.”
~ Rollo May, 1985, My Quest for Beauty, p. 172

“This sign I give you: every people speaks its tongue of good and evil, which the neighbor does not understand. It has invented its own language of customs and rights.”
~ Nietzsche, 1892/1966, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (W. Kaufmann, Trans.), p. 49

“Integrity is unity of the personality; it implies being brutally honest with ourselves about our intentionality. Since intentionality is inextricably bound up with the daimonic, this is never an easy, nor always pleasant pursuit. But being willing to admit our daimonic tendencies – to know them consciously and to wisely oversee them – brings with it the invaluable blessing of freedom, vigor, inner strength, and self-acceptance.”
~ Stephen A. Diamond, 1996, Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic, p. 233.

“True, we must dare look things in the face before we dare think, speak, act, or assume responsibility. If we dare not even look, what else are we good for?”
~ Lu Xun, 1925/1961 (“On Looking Facts in the Face” in Lu Xun Selected Works, Vol. 2), p. 198

“The world is changing from day to day; it is high time for our writers to take off their masks, look frankly, keenly, and boldly at life, and write about real flesh and blood. It is high time for a brand-new arena for literature, high time for some bold fighters to charge headlong into battle!”
~ Lu Xun, 1925/1961 (“On Looking Facts in the Face” in Lu Xun Selected Works, Vol. 2), p. 203

“But in order to change a situation one has first to see it for what it is: in the present case, to accept the fact, whatever one does with it thereafter, that the Negro has been formed by this nation, for better or for worse, and does not belong to any other—not to Africa, and certainly not to Islam. The paradox—and a fearful paradox it is—is that the American Negro can have no future anywhere, on any continent, as long as he is unwilling to accept his past. To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.
~ James Baldwin, 1962, The Fire Next Time (p. 81). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
~ James Baldwin, 1955, Notes of a Native Son (pp. 178-179).

“Sometimes I think it is my mission to bring faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful.”
~ Paul Tillich as quoted by Rollo May, 1988, in Paulus: Tillich as Spiritual Teacher, p. 71

“The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.”
~ Albert Camus, 1948, The Plague (Trans. Stuart Gilbert), p. 4

“If everyone distorts reality to some degree it is obvious that everyone is ‘sick,’ and general standards of normality cannot be matters of clinical judgment but are instead matters of cultural convention about the range and types of sickness that a society will tolerate.”
~ Ernest Becker, 1971, Birth and Death of Meaning (p. 152). Free Press.

“In those days it was possible for a Greek to flee from an over-abundant reality as though it were but the tricky scheming off the imagination-and to flee, not like Plato into the land of eternal ideas, into the workshop off the world-creator, feasting one’s eyes on the unblemished unbreakable archetypes, but into the rigor mortis off the coldest emptiest concept off all, the concept of being.”
~ Nietzsche, 1873/1962, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, pp.80-18

“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.”
~ Rollo May, 1979, Psychology and the Human Dilemma, p. 56

“But freedom is the possibility of a total and centered act of the personality, an act in which all the drives and influences which constitute the destiny of man are brought into the centered unity of a decision.”
~ Paul Tillich, 1957, Systematic Theology (Vol. 2), p. 42-43

“Let those who hanker after the past return to the past! Let those who want to leave the world leave the world! Let those who want to ascend to heaven do so! Let those whose souls want to leave their bodies expire quickly! The earth today should be inhabited by man with a firm hold on the present, a firm hold on the earth.”
~ Lu Xun, 1925/1961 (“Stray Thoughts” in Lu Xun Selected Works, Vol. 2) p. 159

“We might say that psychoanalysis revealed to us the complex penalties of denying the truth of man’s condition, what we might call the costs of pretending not to be mad.”
~ Ernest Becker, 1973, The Denial of Death, p. 29

“True fighters dare face the sorrows of humanity, and look unflinchingly at bloodshed. What sorrow and joy are theirs! But the Creator’s common device for ordinary people is to let the passage of time wash away old traces leaving only pale-red bloodstains and a vague pain; and he lets men live on ignobly and amid these, to keep this quasi-human world going.”
~ Lu Xun, 1926/1961 (“In Memory of Miss Liu Hezhen” in Lu Xun, Selected Works, Vol. 2), p. 268

“…once I gave up the hunt for villains, I had little recourse but to take responsibility for my choices…. Needless to say, this is far less satisfying that nailing villains. It also turned out to be more healing in the end…”
~ Barbara Brown Taylor, 2006, Experiments with Truth, in Sojourners (Nov. 2006), p. 46

“Evil, in this system of ethics, is that which tears apart, shuts out the other person, raises barriers, sets people against each other.”
~ Rollo May, 1985, My Quest for Beauty, p. 158

“When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.”
~ Albert Camus, 1948, The Plague (Trans. Stuart Gilbert), p. 35

“…men who have not known the horror of death are not likely to be awed by it.”
~ Lu Xun, 1926/1961 (“Dangerous Ground” in Lu Xun Selected Works, Vol. 2), p. 262

“Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.”
~ Simone de Beauvoir, 1948, The Ethics Of Ambiguity, p. 99

“The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.”
James Baldwin, 1955, Notes of a Native Son (p. 67)

“Like students going to school, the planes on their bombing missions fly over Beijing each morning. And each time I hear their engines attack the air I feel a certain slight tension, as if I were witnessing the invasion of Death, though this heightens my consciousness of the existence of Life.”
~ Lu Xun, 1926/1959, The Awakening (In Lu Xun Selected Works, Vol. 1, p. 365).

“The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days… and yet we were profoundly separated from her.”
~ Simone de Beauvoir, 1965, A Very Easy Death, p. 100

“The man of knowledge must not only love his enemies, he must also be able to hate his friends.”
~ Nietzsche, 1892/1966, Thus Spoke Zarathustra(W. Kaufmann, Trans.), p. 78

“One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.”
~ Nietzsche, 1892/1966, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (W. Kaufmann, Trans.), p. 78

“Why should young people look for guides who hang out gided placards to advertise themselves? They would do better to look for friends, unite with them, and advance together towards some quarter where it seems possible to survive.”
~ Lu Xun, 1925/1961 (“Teachers” in Lu Xun Selected Works, Vol. 2), p. 165

“I undertake to risk annihilation so that two or three truths can cast their essential light on the world.”
~ Frantz Fanon, 1952/2008, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 202

“To grasp life and meaning, we assume constancy where it does not exist. We name experiences, emotions, and subjective states and assume that what is named is as enduring as its name. Human beings blessed and cursed with consciousness – especially consciousness of their own being – think in terms of names, words, symbols.”
~ James F. T. Bugental, 1999, Psychotherapy Isn’t What You Think, p. 170

“Symbols are specific acts or figures, while myths develop and elaborate these symbols into a story which contains characters and several episodes. The myth is thus more inclusive. But both symbol and myth have the same function psychologically; they are man’s way of expressing the quintessence of his experience – his way of seeing his life, his self-image and his relations to the world of his fellow men and of nature – in a total figure which at the same moment carries the vital meaning of this experience.”
~ Rollo May, 1961, “The Meaning of the Oedipus Myth”
In Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry, Volume 1, p. 44

“A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.”
~ Albert Camus, 1955, The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays, p. 124

“It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.”
~ Rollo May, 1991, The Cry for Myth, p. 25

“The same sensitivity that opens artists to Being also makes them vulnerable to the dark powers of non-Being. It is no accident that many creative people–including Dante, Pascal, Goethe, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Beethoven, Rilke, Blake, and Van Gogh–struggled with depression, anxiety, and despair. They paid a heavy price to wrest their gifts from the clutches of non-Being. But this is what true artists do: they make their own frayed lives the cable for the surges of power generated in the creative force fields of Being and non-Being.”
~ David N. Elkins, 1998, Beyond Religion, p. 124

“All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academics, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all off which limit it to a fake learnedness.”
~ Nietzsche, 1873/1962, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, pp. 37-38

“All that philosophers have handled for millennia has been conceptual mummies; nothing actual has ever escaped from their hands alive.”
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, 1889/1990, Twilight of the Idols (R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.), p. 45

“Humans are inherently hungry for life, greedy for having more and more fulfilling living. Yet so often we postpone or revitalize our living.”
~ James F. T. Bugental, 1990, Intimate Journeys, p. 239

“What makes us most human is not whether we are or are not biologically driven and determined beings; but, rather, how we respond to this relative truth. The conscious choices we make in related to the dynamic, psychobiological forces of the daimonic define our humanity.”
~ Stephen A. Diamond, 1996, Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic, p. 179

“Terrorism and the whole drug scene are vivid examples of the fact that what persons abhor most of all in life is the possibility that they will not matter.”
~ Rollo May, 1985, My Quest for Beauty, p. 214.

“Finally, the oppressor has a good case for showing that respect for freedom is never without difficulty, and perhaps he may even assert that one can never respect all freedoms at the same time. But that simply means that man must accept the tension of the struggle, that his liberation must actively seek to perpetuate itself, without aiming at an impossible state of equilibrium and rest; this does not mean that he ought to prefer the sleep of slavery to this incessant conquest. Whatever the problem raised for him, the setbacks that he will have to assume, and the difficulties with which he will have to struggle, he must reject oppression at any cost.”
~ Simone de Beauvoir, 1948, The Ethics Of Ambiguity, p. 96

“Like most human behavior, violence has meaning: it only seems ‘senseless’ or ‘meaningless’ to the extent we are unable–or unwilling–to decode it.”
~ Stephen A. Diamond, 1996, Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic, p. 9

“…history has shown that the most terrible crimes against love have been committed in the name of fanatically defended doctrines.”
~ Paul Tillich, 1957, The Dynamics of Faith, p. 113

“Lu Xun is a good model for us. Although he is known more for his critiquing of the culture and ideas of his time, a closer reading shows that he greatly values history and tradition. He honored and revered his culture and the people of China. Yet, he was very critical when people became bound to their ideas. There must be balance. We must revere, but not over-revere; we must honor, but not create idols; we must critique, but not destroy; we must preserve, but not stagnate. This honors history and tradition. Yet, many who seek to preserve tradition destroy it by holding on too tightly. We must let our history be freer than this.”
~ Louis Hoffman, 2014, The Proper Use of Tradition and Scholarly Authority

“What, then, would be the highest possible standard? It could be nothing less than that of the most complete liberation of man: from narrowness of perception that prevents him from seeing a larger reality to which he must adapt; from rigid conditioning that prevents his changeability in the face of new challenges; from a slavish rooting in a source of power that constrains him and prevents his own free and independent choice; from uncritical functioning in a hero-system that binds his energies obsessively and that channels his life tyrannically for him. The syndromes we find would then not be confirmations of psychiatric textbook rubrics, but a critique of society. In other words, the highest possible standard of health for man would be a humanistic-critical one that would help him develop as a free, self-reliant, independent being; the thing that prevents this kind of development is precisely his automatic conditioning into cultural fictions; and so, the standard of health must at all times be ‘What is Real?’”
~ Ernest Becker, 1971 Birth and Death of Meaning (pp. 153-154). Free Press.

“As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.”
~ Simone de Beauvoir, 1948, The Ethics Of Ambiguity, p. 7

“Challenging the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of viewpoints. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the impassioned claim by the colonized that their world is fundamentally different.”
~ Frantz Fanon, 1963/2004, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 6

“I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. the will to a system is a lack of integrity.”
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, 1889/1990, Twilight of the Idols, (R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.), p. 35

“We are quick to debate and assert a correct position, slow to ask questions and seek to understand. And even our questions, when they are asked, are really just trickery, pretending to seek understanding while seeking to find a weakness in the position of the other. Such processes serve no constructive purposes; they only tear down and reinforce what we believe we know to be truth.”
~ Louis Hoffman, 2014, The Proper Use of Tradition and Scholarly Authority

“I find myself one day in the world, and I acknowledge one right for myself: the right to demand human behavior from the other.
And one duty: the duty never to let my decisions renounce my freedom.”
~ Frantz Fanon, 1952/2008, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 204

“Nature does not define woman: it is she who defines herself by reclaiming nature for herself in her affectivity.”
Simone de Beauvoir, 1949/2011, The Second Sex, p. 49

“Science requires an engagement with the world, a live encounter between the knower and the known.”
~ Parker J. Palmer, 1998, The Courage to Teach, p. 54

“Indeed, there is nothing more arbitrary than intervening as a stranger in a destiny which is not ours…”
~ Simone de Beauvoir, 1948, The Ethics Of Ambiguity, p. 86

“But thus I counsel you, my friends: Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. They are people of a low sort and stock; the hangman and the bloodhound look out of their faces. Mistrust all who talk much of their justice! Verily, their souls lack more than honey. And when they call themselves the good and the just, do not forget that they would be pharisees, if only they had – power.”
~ Nietzsche, 1892/1966, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (W. Kaufmann, Trans.), p. 100

“Man is not what he believes himself to be in his conscious decisions.”
~ Paul Tillich, 1961, “Existentialism and Psychotherapy, in Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry, Volume 1, p. 13

“Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals…”
~ Ernest Becker, 1973, The Denial of Death, p. 204

“…philosophical systems are wholly true for their founders only.”
~ Nietzsche, 1873/1962, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, p. 23

“But it is no doubt impossible to approach any human problem without partiality: even the way of asking the questions, of adopting perspectives, presupposes hierarchies of interests; all characteristics comprise values; every so-called objective description is set against an ethical background.
~ Simone de Beauvoir, 1949/2011, The Second Sex, p. 16

“We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.”
~ Albert Camus, 1955, The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays, p.

“Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.”
~ Albert Camus, 1948, The Plague (Trans. Stuart Gilbert), p. 34

“Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.”
~ Rollo May, 1958, “The Origins of the Existential Movement in Psychology” in Existence, p. 36

“If we possess our why of life we can put up with almost any how.”
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, 1889/1990, Twilight of the Idols (Trans. R. J. Hollingdale), p. 33

“There is scarcely any passion without struggle.”
~ Albert Camus, 1955, The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays, p. 73

“In my more rebellious days I tried to doubt the existence of the sacred, but the universe kept dancing and life kept writing poetry across my life.”
~ David N. Elkins, 1998, Beyond Religion, p. 81

“Mass communication–wonder as it may be technologically and something to be appreciated and valued–presents us with a serious danger, 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.”
~ Rollo May, 1975, The Courage to Create, p. 73

“Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.”
~ Albert Camus, 1955, The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays, p. 10

“our reason is apt to be impotent or distorted without the support of our feelings; while feelings unguided by reasons can be dangerous and destructive.”
~ James F. T. Bugental, 1990, Intimate Journeys, p. 66

“All great reformers, visionaries, or missionaries have a meaning mind-set rather than a happiness mindset…”
~ Paul T. P. Wong, 2011, “Reclaiming Positive Psychology: A Meaning-Centered Approach to Sustainable Growth and Radical Empiricism” (Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 5, 408-412).

“We cannot really know what the word “happiness” means, and still less what authentic values it covers; there is no way to measure the happiness of others, and it is always easy to call a situation that one would like to impose on others happy: in particular, we declare happy those condemned to stagnation, under the pretext that happiness is immobility.”
~ Simone de Beauvoir, 1949/2011, The Second Sex, p. 16

“A paradox arises: the only way to meaning in freedom is through boundaries. The only way that boundaries make any sense at all is through freedom.”
~ Clark Moustakas, 1995, Being-In, Being-For, Being-With, p. 93

“Our sexuality is a powerful, creative, and enlivening part of our embodiedness, but it can also be wounding and destructive. It can bring us to intense experiences of our relatedness, our separateness, our capacity for ecstasy, our capacity for emotional pain and despair.”
~ James F. T. Bugental, 1990, Intimate Journeys, p. 327

“I define anxiety as the apprehension cued off by a threat to some value which the individual holds essential to his existence as a self”
~ Rollo May, 1967, The Meaning of Anxiety, p. 72

“There are cases where the slave does not know his servitude and where it is necessary to bring the seed of his liberation to him from the outside: his submission is not enough to justify the tyranny which is imposed upon him.”
~ Simone de Beauvoir, 1948, The Ethics Of Ambiguity, p. 85

“Courage is not a virtue or value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundations that underlies and gives reality to all other virtue and personal values.”
~ Rollo May, 1975, The Courage to Create, p. 13

“Laws, rules, folkways, mores, and the like have grown out of shared human experience and are worthy of our respect and attention. They are not, however, absolutes, and they need to be continually reexamined and revised.”
~ James F. T. Bugental, 1990, Intimate Journeys, p. 328

“It is true that we can see the therapist as a technician only if we have first viewed the patient as some sort of machine.”
~ Viktor E. Frankl, 2000, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, p. 26

“Seeking to discover one’s nature is different than seeking an essential self. It is not searching for something as specific. Instead, it could be conceived as seeking an understanding of the human condition as well as how one personally relates to or situates oneself in connection with the human condition. This weaves together the social and personal with the nature of being human.”
~ Louis Hoffman, 2014, Finding Oneself and Creating Oneself: Implications of the Psychotherapy Folkore

“Now, it is my contention that the deneuroticization of humanity requires a rehumanization of psychotherapy.”
~ Viktor E. Frankl, 2000, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, p. 104

“I could not blot out hope, for hope belongs to the future.”
~ Lu Xun, 1922/1959, Preface to A Call to Arms (in Lu Xun Selected Works, Vol. 1, p. 39)

“…suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning…”
~ Viktor E. Frankl, 1959/1984, Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 117

“The ability to forget the past enables people to free themselves gradually from the pain they once suffered; but it also often makes them repeat the mistakes of their predecessors.”
~ Lu Xun, 1923/1961, (“What Happens After Nora Leaves Home” in Lu Xun Selected Works, Vol. 2), p. 89

“…people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.”
~ James Baldwin, 1962 The Fire Next Time, p. 98

“…in such illnesses of the psyche, and particularly in those that are not caused by the psyche itself but are ultimately induced by the physical, in other words the so-called mental illnesses (psychoses, in contrast to the psychologically caused neuroses): many of these cases demonstrate that the inability to suffer becomes a symptom in itself.”
~ Viktor E. Frankl (2021) Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything, pp. 53-54

“These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. Thus it is impossible to define the meaning in life in a general way.”
~ Viktor E. Frankl, 1959/1984, Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 85

“What clients need is trust that they have the resilience, in themselves, to meet the unknown, to experience it, and to survive.”
~ Mark Yang, 2012, Pain, Suffering, and Companionship

“Suffering can thus be seen in large part as a kind of resistance or reactivity to the pain of the present moment.”
~ Donald Rothberg, The Engaged Spiritual Life, p. 74

“…a psychotherapy that is chiefly concerned with information and a psychotherapy that centers on the actual experiencing of the client in the living moment has great significance for life-changing psychotherapy.”
~ James F. T. Bugental, 1999, Psychotherapy Isn’t What You Think, p, xi 

“Our passion for categorization, life neatly fitted into pegs, has led to an unforeseen, paradoxical distress; confusion, a breakdown of meaning. Those categories which were meant to define and control the world for us have boomeranged us into chaos; in which limbo we whirl, clutching the straws of our definitions.”
~ James Baldwin, 1955, Notes of a Native Son (p. 19)

“…the fact is that every concrete human being is always uniquely situated.”
~ Simone de Beauvoir, 1949/2011, The Second Sex, p. 4

“The greatest gift we can offer anyone is our true presence.”
~ Thich Nhat Hanh, 1998, The Heart of Buddhism, p. 194

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.”
~ James Baldwin, 1962 The Fire Next Time, p. 91-92

“…though the fact of death destroys us, the idea of death can save us. In other words, our awareness of death can throw a different perspective on life and incite us to rearrange our priorities.”
~ Irvin D. Yalom, 1989, Love’s Executioner, p. 111

“We know so much about the people we work with [in psychotherapy], so much more than we know about almost anyone else, but still it is so little.”
~ James F. T. Bugental, 1990, Intimate Journeys, p. 235

“Therapy demonstrated how we all imprison ourselves by the ways we define ourselves and our worlds. When this recognition is deeply experienced, the world is already beginning to change–since the crippling element in these definitions is the certainty that things are–and can be–only the way one sees them at the time.”
~ James F. T. Bugental, 1990, Intimate Journeys, p. 329

“All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a streetcorner or in a restaurant’s revolving door. So it is with absurdity. The absurd world more than others derives its nobility from that abject birth.”
~ Albert Camus, 1955, The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays, p. 12

“…the challenging of the very principle of foreign domination brings about essential mutations in the consciousness of the colonized, in the manner in which he perceives the colonizer, in his human status in the world.”
~ Frantz Fanon, 1959/1965, A Dying Colonialism, p. 69

“If you are not a victim when the government you voted for and army your young brothers served in, commits ‘genocide,’ without hesitation or remorse, then you are undoubtedly a torturer. And if you choose to be a victim, risking one or two days in prison, you are simply trying got take the easy way out.”
~ Jean-Paul Sartre, “Preface” in The Wretched of the Earth, p. lviii

“…belatedly making peace with Freud and leaning onto Fromm and Rank means accepting into one’s thought a truly rounded and less rosy view of human nature; whereas I once as a social scientist dedicatedly followed Rousseau in his straight-forward view that man is natural or good, and is “corrupted by society,” I slighted the darker side, the side of human evil and viciousness. As we will see from these pages man is mostly innocent, really potentially good, even naturally noble; and as we will stress, society is responsible, largely, for shaping people, for giving them opportunities for unfolding more freely and more unafraid. But this unfolding is confused and complicated by man’s basic animal fears: by his deep and indelible anxieties about his own impotence and death, and his fear of being overwhelmed and sucked up into the world and into others. All this gives his life a quality of drivenness, of underlying desperation, an obsession with the meaning of it and with his own significance as a creature. And this is what drives him to try to make his mark on the world, to try to twist it and turn it to his own designs, to bury over the rumbling anxieties; and this usually means that he tries to twist and turn others, make his mark on them, use them to justify his own problematic life. As Rank put it so bluntly: Man creates “out of freedom a prison.” This means everyman, in any society, from the most “primitive” to the most “civilized,” no matter what the child training programs or economic system.”
~ Ernest Becker, 1971, Birth and Death of Meaning. Free Press.

“The fact of being a human being is infinitely more important than all the singularities that distinguish human beings; it is never the given that confers superiority: “virtue,” as the ancients called it, is defined at the level of “what depends on us.” The same drama of flesh and spirit, and of finitude and transcendence, plays itself out in both sexes; both are eaten away by time, stalked by death, they have the same essential need of the other; and they can take the same glory from their freedom; if they knew how to savor it, they would no longer be tempted to contend for false privileges; and fraternity could then be born between them.”
~ Simone de Beauvoir, 1949/2011, The Second Sex, p. 763

“My final prayer:
O my body, always make me a man who questions!”
~ Frantz Fanon, 1952, Black Skin, White Mask, p. 206

“The issue of evil–or rather, the issue of note confronting evil–has profound, and to my mind adverse, effects on humanistic psychology. I believe it is the most important error in the humanistic movement…. Some people who join and lead the humanistic movement do so in order to find a haven, a port in the storm, a community of like-minded persons who also are playing possum to the evils about us. I, for one, choose to be part of the minority that seeks to make [humanistic psychology a movement] that commits itself actively to confronting the issues of evil and good in our selves, our society, and our world.”
~ Rollo May, 1982, “The Problem of Evil: An Open Letter to Carl Rogers” https://doi.org/10.1177/0022167882223003

“Truly life-changing psychotherapy is–and needs to be–a live engagement between two people struggling with each other and with the forces in both that deny life, restrict awareness, and limit growth. It is messy, its borders are unclear and often shifting, and its processes are continually evolving.”
~ James F. T. Bugental, 1990, Intimate Journeys, p. 138

“It is only when stories are abstracted from a concrete situation and codified into Law or dogma that their life-blood is taken away and thus a people begins to think that its ways of thinking and living are the only real possibilities. When people can no longer listen to other people’s stories, they become enclosed within their own social context, treating their distorted visions of reality as the whole truth. And then they feel that they must destroy other stories, which bear witness that life can be lived in another way.”
James H. Cone, 1997, God of the Oppressed (p. 94).