Willard Gaylin Quotes

#1. Because we are intelligent creatures-meaning that we are freed from instinctive and patterned behavior to a degree unparalleled in the animal kingdom-we are capable of, and dependent on, using rational choice to decide our futures.

Willard Gaylin

#2. Jealousy, which serves the struggle for survival, can deteriorate into the envy which draws defeat even from victory.

Willard Gaylin

#3. Feeling good and feeling bad are not necessarily opposites. Both at least involve feelings. Any feeling is a reminder of life. The worst 'feeling' evidently is non-feeling.

Willard Gaylin

#4. The larger office, the corner space, the extra window are the teddy bears and tricycles of adult office life

Willard Gaylin

#5. In a world where survival is always seen as a struggle, and in which some pitfalls always exist, if something brings into question our confidence in our own coping ability, it will threaten our safety.

Willard Gaylin

#6. English is such a deliciously complex and undisciplined language, we can bend, fuse, distort words to all our purposes. We give old words new meanings, and we borrow new words from any language that intrudes into our intellectual environment.

Willard Gaylin

#7. Feelings are the fine instruments which shape decision-making in an animal cursed and blessed with intelligence, and the freedom which is its corollary. They are signals directing us toward goodness, safety, pleasure, and group survival.

Willard Gaylin

#8. Man, the most complicated of the animals, has a relatively short gestation period. Beyond that, he will be born, unlike most mammals, in a ridiculously helpless state.

Willard Gaylin

#9. All of us inevitably spend our lives evolving from an initial to a final stage of dependence. If we are fortunate enough to achieve power and relative independence along the way, it is a transient and passing glory.

Willard Gaylin

#10. Expressing anger is a form of public littering.

Willard Gaylin

#11. A street thug and a paid killer are professionals - beasts of prey, if you will, who have dissociated themselves from the rest of humanity and can now see human beings in the same way that trout fishermen see trout.

Willard Gaylin

#12. When men achieve the fruits of their material success, they often become aware of an emptiness
an incompleteness
in their lives;the hollowness of having, but not raising, children, of not making true commitments to them. Which, sadly, does not mean that they weren't capable of it.

Willard Gaylin

#13. We occupy a space of our own creation-a collage compounded by bits and pieces of actuality arranged into a design determined by our internal perceptions, our hopes, our fears, our memories, and our anticipations.

Willard Gaylin

#14. Our imagination and reasoning powers facilitate anxiety; the anxious feeling is precipitated not by an absolute impending threat-such as the worry about an examination, a speech, travel-but rather by the symbolic and often unconscious representations.

Willard Gaylin

#15. Shame and guilt are noble emotions essential in the maintenance of civilized society, and vital for the development of some of the most refined and elegant qualities of human potential.

Willard Gaylin

#16. I not only think that we will tamper with Mother Nature, I think Mother wants us to.

Willard Gaylin

#17. We must live in groups; other people are like nutrients for us, and are absolutely essential for our survival.

Willard Gaylin

#18. To probe for unconscious determinants of behavior and then define a man in their terms exclusively, ignoring his overt behavior altogether, is a greater distortion than ignoring the unconscious completely.

Willard Gaylin

#19. A man may not always be what he appears to be, but what he appears to be is always a significant part of what he is.

Willard Gaylin

#20. We are what we seem to be.

Willard Gaylin

#21. Life is to be enjoyed, not simply endured. Pleasure and goodness and joy support the pursuit of survival.

Willard Gaylin