Sheldon Kopp Quotes

34 Sourced Quotes

To live without the creative potential of our own destructiveness is to be a cardboard angel.

Sheldon Kopp
One can choose life, or choose death. Having chosen life, I must live it as it is.

Sheldon Kopp
In the long run, we get no more than we have been willing to risk giving.

Sheldon Kopp
But after a while, she began to experience the new reality of each person as being as strong and as weak as anyone else. Slowly, she learned that each of us grown-ups has as much and as little power as the other, and that we had best learn to take care of ourselves.

Sheldon Kopp
Anarchy could never get a man to the moon, but it may the only mode that can allow us to survive on earth.

Sheldon Kopp
All of the truly important battles are waged within the self.

Sheldon Kopp
He prefers the security of known misery to the misery of unfamiliar insecurity.

Sheldon Kopp
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.

Sheldon Kopp
That is one of the reasons why a man should pick a path with heart, so that he can find his laughter.

Sheldon Kopp
The adult May fly lives only a few hours, just long enough to mate. He has neither mouth nor stomach, but needs neither since he does not live long enough to need to eat. The eggs the May fly leaves hatch after the parent has died. What is it all about. What's the point? There is no point. That's just the way it is. It is neither good nor bad. Life is mainly simply inevitable.

Sheldon Kopp
The only times that we can have what we long for are those moments when we stop grasping for it. At such times, all things are possible: "to a mind that is 'still' the whole universe surrenders".

Sheldon Kopp
Dreams provide a kind of wisdom of the heart, an echoing voice of a profound human sensitivity too often lost to us in the reasonable life of days.

Sheldon Kopp
You are free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.

Sheldon Kopp
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 Kopp
Sometimes it seems to me that in this absurdly random life there is some inherent justice in the outcome of personal relationships. In the long run, we get no more than we have been willing to give.

Sheldon Kopp
Again and again I find that my own inner counselor, my secret dreaming self, is not only wise and helpful but usually amusing as well.

Sheldon Kopp
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 Kopp
Love is more than simply being open to experiencing the anguish of another person's suffering. It is the willingness to live with the helpless knowing that we can do nothing to save the other from his pain.

Sheldon Kopp
It is not possible to know how much is just enough, until we have experienced how much is more than enough.

Sheldon Kopp
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 Kopp
And so, it is not astonishing that, though the patient enters therapy insisting that he wants to change, more often than not, what he really wants is to remain the same and to get the therapist to make him feel better.

Sheldon Kopp
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.'

Sheldon Kopp
Sometimes life seems like a poorly designed cage within which man has been sentenced to be free.

Sheldon Kopp
For each of us, the only hope resides in his own efforts, in completing his own story, not in the other's interpretation.

Sheldon Kopp
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.

Sheldon Kopp
We must learn to give ourselves permission to blunder, to fail, and to make fools of ourselves every day for the rest of our lives. We do so in any case.

Sheldon Kopp
You can't make anyone love you. You just have to reveal who you are and take your chances.

Sheldon Kopp
I remember a group therapy session when one of the patients was reluctantly turning his corner. He would accept it, he said, but he wouldn't like the idea of having to solve problems every day for the rest of his life. My co-therapist told him that it was not required that he like it. She shared her own displeasure, saying: 'I remember that when I first discovered what life was like, I was furious. I guess I'm still kind of mad sometimes.'

Sheldon Kopp
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 Kopp
If I reveal myself without worrying about how others will respond, then some will care, though others may not. But who can love me, if no one knows me? I must risk it, or live alone.

Sheldon Kopp