When established identities become outworn or unfinished ones threaten to remain incomplete, special crises compel men to wage holy wars, by the crue… - Erik Erikson

The search of youth is not for all-permissibility, but rather for new ways of directly facing up to what truly counts.

modern times, of course, political ideologies have taken over the numinous function, with the face of the leader multiplied on a thousand banners.

A creative man has no choice. He may come across his supreme task almost accidentally. But once the issue is joined, his task proves to be at the same time intimately related to his most personal conflicts, to his superior selective perception, and to the stubbornness of his one-way will; he must court sickness, failure, or insanity in order to test the alternative whether the established world will crush him, or whether he will disestablish a sector of this world's outworn fundaments and make place for a new one.