Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think that one should view with philosophic admiration the strange paths of the libido and should investigate the purposes of its circuitous ways.
The heaping together of paintings by Old Masters in museums is a catastrophe; likewise, a collection of a hundred Great Brains makes one big fathead.
Continuous creation is to be thought of not only as a series of successive acts of creation, but also as the eternal presence of the one creative act.
A sense of a wider meaning to one's existence is what raises a man beyond mere getting and spending. If he lacks this sense, he is lost and miserable.
We are a psychic process which we do not control, or only partly direct. Consequently, we cannot have any final judgment about ourselves or our lives.
Science...is part and parcel of our knowledge and obscures our insight only when it holds that the understanding given by it is the only kind there is.
I could not say I believe. I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God.
Meaninglessnes s inhibits fullness of life and is therefore the equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable--perh aps everything.
Everyone knows nowadays that people 'have complexes'. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.
We do not feel as if we were producing the dreams, it is rather as if the dreams came to us. They are not subject to our control but obey their own laws.
Because the European does not know his own unconscious, he does not understand the East and projects it into everything he fears and despises in himself.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort.
Gnosticism was stamped out completely and its remnants are so badly mangled that special study is needed to get any insight at all into its inner meaning.
Space flights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because it is easier to go to Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one's own being.
Criticism can be effective when there is something that must be destroyed or dissolved, but it is capable only of harm when there is something to be built.
Be simple and always take the next step. You needn't see it in advance, but you can look back at it afterwards.There is no 'how' of life, one just does it.
We cannot imagine events that are connected non-causally and are capable of a non-causal explanation. But that does not mean that such events do not exist.
In my case Pilgrim's Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.
The seat of faith, however, is not consciousness but spontaneous religious experience, which brings the individual's faith into immediate relation with God.
The attainment of wholeness requires one to stake one's whole being. Nothing less will do; there can be no easier conditions, no substitutes, no compromises.
Deeply listening to music opens up new avenues of research I'd never even dreamed of. I feel from now on music should be an essential part of every analysis.
Every Mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother and every mother extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter.
If our religion is based on salvation, our chief emotions will be fear and trembling. If our religion is based on wonder, our chief emotion will be gratitude.
Enlightenment doesnt occur from sitting around visualizing images of light, but from integrating the darker aspects of the Self into the conscious personality.
Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. Why should I henceforth not love my dreams and not make their riddling images into objects of my daily consideration?
Seldom, or perhaps never, does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain.
The Self then functions as a union of opposites and thus constitutes the most immediate experience of the Divine which it is psychologically possible to imagine
I am no longer alone with myself, and I can only artificially recall the scary and beautiful feeling of solitude. This is the shadow side of the fortune of love.
Great talents are the most lovely and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off.
The dream is a series of images, which are apparently contradictory and nonsensical, but arise in reality from psychologic material which yields a clear meaning.
It is high time that we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to preach the art of seeing.
The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor naked heathen, but the spiritual heathen who populate Europe have as yet heard nothing of Christianity.
Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.
From the viewpoint of analytic psychology, the theatre, aside from any aesthetic value, may be considered as an institution for the treatment of the mass complex.
If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.
Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.
That which compels us to create a substitute for ourselves is not the external lack of objects, but our incapacity to lovingly include a thing outside of ourselves
One is forced to speak not of what is held in common between the cultures, but what is held in common between the myths, and that in its simplest archetypal forms.
I came to Freud for facts. I read 'The Interpretation of Dreams' and I thought- 'Oh, here is a man who is not just theorizing away, here is a man who has got facts.
The fact is that certain ideas exist almost everywhere and at all times and can even spontaneously create themselves quite independently of migration and tradition.
To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is.
Man and woman become a devil to each other when they do not separate their spiritual paths, for the nature of created beings is always the nature of differentiation.
A book of mine is always a matter of fate. There is something unpredictable about the process of writing, and I cannot prescribe for myself any predetermined course.
A criminal becomes a popular figure because he unburdens in no small degree the consciences of his fellow man, for now they know once more where evil is to be found.
Life is teleology par excellence; it is the intrinsic striving towards a goal, and the living organism is a system of directed aims which seek to fulfill themselves.
There are all too many who, on account of their notorious ineptitude, thrive better in a rationalist system than in freedom. Freedom is one of those difficult things.
I am looking forward enormously to getting back to the sea again, where the overstimulated psyche can recover in the presence of that infinite peace and spaciousness.
Six weeks after his death my father appeared to me in a dream... It was an unforgettable experience, and it forced me for the first time to think about life after death.
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
The time is a critical one, for it marks the beginning of the second half of life, when a metanoia, a mental transformation, not infrequently occurs. (on being 36 yrs old)