-
Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.
-
The word 'belief' is a difficult thing for me. I don't believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it – I don't need to believe it.
-
One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games and it cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive selves.
-
...the relatively unconscious man driven by his natural impulses because, imprisoned in his familiar world, he clings to the commonplace, the obvious, the probable, the collectively valid, using for his motto: 'Thinking is difficult. Therefore, let the herd pronounce judgement.'
-
There is no coming to consciousness without pain.
-
The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.
-
We shall probably get nearest to the truth if we think of the conscious and personal psyche as resting upon the broad basis of an inherited and universal psychic disposition which is as such unconscious, and that our personal psyche bears the same relation to the collective psyche as the individual to society.
-
It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.
-
All ordinary expression may be explained causally, but creative expression which is the absolute contrary of ordinary expression, will be forever hidden from human knowledge.
-
A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life's morning.
-
Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.
-
Everyone knows nowadays that people 'have complexes'. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.
-
Our psychology is … a science of mere phenomena without any metaphysical implications. It Treats all metaphysical claims and assertions as mental phenomena, and regards them as statements about the mind and its structure.
-
It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.
-
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?
-
Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.
-
A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.
-
We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.
-
We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.
-
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
-
It is astounding that man, the instigator, inventor and vehicle of all these developments, the originator of all judgements and decisions and the planner of the future, must make himself such a quantité negligeable.
-
Nature must not win the game, but she cannot lose. And whenever the conscious mind clings to hard and fast concepts and gets caught in its own rules and regulations - as is unavoidable and of the essence of civilized consciousness - nature pops up with her inescapable demands.
-
Our blight is ideologies - they are the long-expected Antichrist!
-
Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.