Sheldon Kopp Quotes

• Like the Hasidim, just when life is heaviest with pain and anguish, that is the time when we will dance and sing together to waken the sleeping God of our own lost hope.

  Sheldon Kopp

  Topics in Life

• Then, like the innocent Forest People, for a moment we will live in a world created by a God so benevolent that, when there is trouble, we will know that He must be asleep.

  Sheldon Kopp

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People

• We will call out to each other in the darkness of the Great Forest, so that we may not be lost to one another.

  Sheldon Kopp

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Forest

• Only pains of life too intense to be borne could lead a man to forgo all response, to give up completely the joy of living as other men live.

  Sheldon Kopp

  Topics in Life

• But children need at least the continuing hope that their parents may come to love them. To decide that these crazy parents will never love her, no matter what she does, no matter whom she becomes, would leave a child buried in a depth of despair in which she would surely suffocate and die.

  Sheldon Kopp

  Topics in Children

• Of course, one other hypothetical alternative would have been for the child to decide that since she was fine the way she was, there must have been something terribly wrong with her parents.

  Sheldon Kopp

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Decide

• Research in self-disclosure supports my own experience that the personal openness of the guru facilitates and invites the increased openness of the pilgrim.

  Sheldon Kopp

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Research

• Should he start out on a psychotherapeutic pilgrimage, he sets out on an adventure in narration. The principle of explanation consists of getting the story told – somehow, anyhow – in order to discover how it begins.

  Sheldon Kopp

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Pilgrimage

• We must always see our own feelings of uneasiness as being our chance for “making the growth choice rather than the fear choice.

  Sheldon Kopp

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Feelings

• Crises marked by anxiety, doubt, and despair have always been those periods of personal unrest that occur at the times when a man is sufficiently unsettled to have an opportunity for personal growth.

  Sheldon Kopp

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Man

• It is, of course, necessary to have rules and procedures if we wish to accomplish large and complex tasks, but the question of whether or not it is worth the cost must be perennially re-examined.

  Sheldon Kopp

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Necessary

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Required

• 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.

  Sheldon Kopp

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Remember

• 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 Kopp

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Attention

• 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.

  Sheldon Kopp

  Topics in God

• Parents who were themselves raised with too little attention given to their own early feelings, if they have not worked out the resulting emotional problems in subsequent years, often look forward to having children of their own so that the children will make them happy.

  Sheldon Kopp

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Parents

• The most insidious of the premature responsibilities that may be foisted onto some children is the expectation that the child is somehow supposed to take care of his parents, rather than the other way around.

  Sheldon Kopp

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Responsibilities

• You can’t get there from here, and besides there’s no place else to go.

  Sheldon Kopp

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Place

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Eggs

• 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.

  Sheldon Kopp

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Adult

Sheldon Kopp (47)

Birth:	29th March, 1929
Death:	29th March, 1999
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Author, Psychologist

About

Sheldon Kopp was a psychotherapist and author, based in Washington, D.C.. He was born in New York City, and received his PhD from the New School for Social Research. In addition to his private practice, he served as a Psychotherapy Supervisor for the Pastoral Counselling and Consultation Centres in Washington. He died of cardiac arrhythmia and pneumonia. He is also popular for his quotes. One of them is, "All of the significant battles are waged within the self."

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