Alexander Lowen Quotes

The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.

When the Christian doesn't find joy on account of his happenings, he can always find joy in spite of them.

Pain is a byproduct of life. That’s the truth. Life sometimes sucks. That’s true for everyone. But if you don’t face the pain and the suck, you don’t ever get the other things either. Laughter. Joy. Love. Pain passes, but those things are worth fighting for. Worth dying for.

The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.

Even when we have physical hardships, we can be very happy.

I am one of the happiest people I know. And that's a weird place to have arrived at from being a depressed Jewish kid.

The truth is, everybody falls into an incinerator of some measure or other. Not literally one. The question is what are you going to do with those bad times? Are you just going to let them gnaw at you?

I've had a very happy life, and although I have had tragedy, I've never suffered from any darkness.

Misfortunes, in fine, cannot be avoided; but they may be sweetened, if not overcome, and our lives made happy by philosophy.

Without dark clouds in our lives, we would never know the joy of sunshine. We can become callous and unteachable if we do not learn from pain.

There have been many times when I have been so entirely sickened of life it was very hard to work to keep on, a half dozen times I have been tempted to suicide, but I am glad I did not give way, for I have always felt that the last half of my life would somehow atone for the first half, and I still think it may ... It is not possible to live in this world without suffering unless one is a born stone. But it is also possible to have a great deal of happiness in spite of the suffering.

There is nothing in afflictions which ought to disturb our joy.

Joy came always after pain.

The trick is to find happiness in the brief gaps between disasters.

Let every hindrance to joy become the soil out of which joy blossoms.

Early happiness handicaps people. I do not regret having been profoundly unhappy.

The thorn is a bridge spanning the muddy depths of agony and sorrow so that one may on the other side dance to the drums of the rose of joy.

I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.

A good man may make the best even of poverty and disease, and the other ills of life; but he can only attain happiness under the opposite conditions

A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless, than one that always verges on despair.

If you had told me when I was 18 that I wouldn't have made it until I was 29, I would have said, Forget it.

For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.

We're always attracted to characters who are people we could identify with and yet are put through incredibly tortured or difficult circumstances - the idea being that you don't really know who you are until you've been tested or suffered in some way.

The most audacious thing I could possibly state in this day and age is that life is worth living. It's worth being bashed against. It's worth getting scarred by. It's worth pouring yourself over every one of its coals.

Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.