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We all live in a tragicomic situation, a life that is in part absurd simply because it is not of our own making. We are born into a disordered world, into a family we did not choose, into circumstances we would have had somewhat improved, and we are even called by a name we did not select. (40)

Sheldon B. Kopp

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Sheldon B. Kopp
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More quotes by Sheldon B. Kopp

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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)
Sheldon B. Kopp
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Maintaining the illusion that I am in control is futile, lonely, and in the long run more always costly than the effort is worth.
Sheldon B. Kopp
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Each person's only hope for improving his lot rests on recognizing the true nature of his or her basic personality, surrendering to it, and becoming who he or she really is.
Sheldon B. Kopp
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Openness to my own dreams puts me in touch with the oldest, most human aspects of who I am it helps me find my place in the community of man.
Sheldon B. Kopp
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If outrageous imagination is the wine of madness, then come fill my cup.
Sheldon B. Kopp
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For a long time now I have trusted my dreaming self as wiser than that waking self whose head is cluttered with reason and practicalities, so busy trying to control things that he sometimes forgets that the heart has reasons that reason does not know. When I dream, I never forget to trust myself.
Sheldon B. Kopp
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That is one of the reasons why a man should pick a path with heart, so that he can find his laughter.
Sheldon B. Kopp
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To live without the creative potential of our own destructiveness is to be a cardboard angel.
Sheldon B. Kopp
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So it is that there is nothing to be taught, but yet there is something to be learned.
Sheldon B. Kopp
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For each of us, the only hope resides in his own efforts, in completing his own story, not in the other's interpretation. (63)
Sheldon B. Kopp
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The unlived life isn't worth examining.
Sheldon B. Kopp
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He prefers the security of known misery to the misery of unfamiliar insecurity.
Sheldon B. Kopp
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I have long trusted dreams as prophetic visions. I do not mean that they foretell the future, only that they illuminate the present, when my eyes are closed, so that I may see clearly.
Sheldon B. Kopp
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It has been a long time since I believed in Reality. I prefer the loveliness and the terror of my subjective experiences to those coldly scientific explanations which in the long run turn out to be no more real, and far less fun, than my own fantasies and musings.
Sheldon B. Kopp
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Escape is not a dirty word. None of us can face what's happening head-on all of the time.
Sheldon B. Kopp
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So it is that God tugs at a pilgrim's sleeve telling him to remember that he is only human. He must be his own man, remain in exile, and belong to himself. He must pay attention to his own feelings and to the meaning of what he does, if he is to be for himself, and yet for others as well.
Sheldon B. Kopp
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I've never began any important venture for which I felt adequate prepared
Sheldon B. Kopp
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It is not possible to know how much is just enough, until we have experienced how much is more than enough. (64)
Sheldon B. Kopp
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Sometimes life seems like a poorly designed cage within which man has been sentenced to be free.
Sheldon B. Kopp
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The continuing struggle was once described in the following metaphor by a patient who had successfully completed a long course of psychotherapy: 'I came to therapy hoping to receive butter for the bread of life. Instead, at the end, I emerged with a pail of sour milk, a churn, and instructions on how to use them.' (138)
Sheldon B. Kopp