Top 35 Sheldon B. Kopp Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You are free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.”

— Sheldon B. Kopp

2. “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 B. Kopp

3. “I’ve never began any important venture for which I felt adequate prepared.”

— Sheldon B. Kopp

4. “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 B. Kopp

5. “All significant battles are fought within self.”

— Sheldon B. Kopp

6. “In the long run we get no more than we have been willing to risk giving.”

— Sheldon B. Kopp

7. “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 B. Kopp

8. “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.”

— Sheldon B. Kopp

9. “Nothing about ourselves can be changed until it is first accepted. Jung.”

— Sheldon B. Kopp

10. “Transformations require that we let go of familiar ways of doing things, without yet knowing what we will do next.”

— Sheldon B. Kopp

11. “The unlived life isn’t worth examining.”

— Sheldon B. Kopp

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

— Sheldon B. Kopp

13. “He prefers the security of known misery to the misery of unfamiliar insecurity.”

— Sheldon B. Kopp

14. “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

15. “Each of us is ultimately alone.”

— Sheldon B. Kopp

16. “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 B. Kopp

17. “The most important things that each man must learn, no one else can teach him. Once he accepts this disappointment, he will be able to stop depending on the therapist, the guru who turns out to be just another struggling human being.”

— Sheldon B. Kopp

18. “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

19. “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 B. Kopp

20. “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

21. “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

22. “Escape is not a dirty word. None of us can face what’s happening head-on all of the time.”

— Sheldon B. Kopp

23. “If outrageous imagination is the wine of madness, then come fill my cup.”

— Sheldon B. Kopp

24. “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

25. “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 B. Kopp

26. “Sometimes life seems like a poorly designed cage within which man has been sentenced to be free.”

— Sheldon B. Kopp

27. “In a way, we each get what we deserve. Everyone is entitled to keep as much garbage as he is willing to put out or to put up with.”

— Sheldon B. Kopp

28. “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

29. “And should I wear my mask too long, when I take it off and try to discard it, I may find that I have thrown my face away with it.”

— Sheldon B. Kopp

30. “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

31. “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 risk giving. We get to keep no more than we earn by our own efforts. In a way, we each get what we deserve. Everyone is entitled to keep as much garbage as he is willing to put out or to put up with.”

— Sheldon B. Kopp

32. “Now I cared, now that it was too late. The other men in group mourned Norman as they might a handicapped brother who had died, a child lost somehow because no one knew how to ask him where it hurt.”

— Sheldon B. Kopp

33. “So it is that there is nothing to be taught, but yet there is something to be learned.”

— Sheldon B. Kopp

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

— Sheldon B. Kopp

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

— Sheldon B. Kopp

36. “There is an old saying that whenever two Jews meet, if one has a problem, the other automatically becomes a rabbi.”

— Sheldon B. Kopp

37. “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 B. Kopp

38. “He may only get to keep that which he is willing to let go of.”

— Sheldon B. Kopp

39. “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