It takes a major unhappiness, a prolonged and bitter experience, to drive us away from loyalties once formed. And sometimes no amount of punishment can make us repudiate our loyalty.

If there is a purpose in life at all, there must be a purpose in suffering and in dying. But no man can tell another what this purpose is. Each must find out for himself, and must accept the responsibility that his answer prescribes. If he succeeds he will continue to grow in spite of all indignities.

Each person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.

Given a thimbleful of [dramatic] facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub.

Thwarted lives have the most character-conditioned hate

Love-incomparably the greatest psychotherapeutic agent-is something that professional psychiatry cannot of itself create, focus, nor release.

Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are not reversible when exposed to new knowledge.

Many studies have discovered a close link between prejudice and patriotism . . . Extreme bigots are almost always super-patriots.

The mature religious sentiment is ordinarily fashioned in the workshop of doubt.

Since we think about ourselves so much of the time, it is comforting to assume ... that we really know the score.... [But] this is not an easy assignment. [As] Santayana wrote, 'Nothing requires a rarer intellectual heroism than willingness to see one's equation written out.'

Reason adapts impulses and beliefs into the real world rationalization, on the other hand, adapts the concept of reality to the impulses and beliefs of the individual. Reasoning discovers the true cause of our acts, rationalization finds good reasons for justifying our acts.

Personality is and does something...It is what lies behind specific acts and within the individual

There is a story of an Oxford student who once remarked, I despise all Americans, but have never met one I didn't like.

As partisans of our own way of life, we cannot help thinking in a partisan manner.

The outlines of the needed psychology of becoming can be discovered by looking within ourselves for it is knowledge of our own uniqueness that supplies the first, and probably the best, hints for acquiring orderly knowledge of others.