47 Quotes by Sheldon B. Kopp

All significant battles are fought within self.

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.

The unlived life isn’t worth examining.

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.

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.

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

Each of us is ultimately alone.

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.

We are all born into families and cultures we didn’t choose, given names we didn’t pick, instructed in behaviour and values we might not have freely chosen, and too often we end up expected to live lives designed by others.