The more veiled becomes the outside world, steadily losing in colour, tone and passions, the more urgently the inner world calls us

Only a few individuals succeed in throwing off mythology in a time of a certain intellectual supremacy--the mass never frees itself.

Conflicts create the fire of affects and emotions; and like every fire it has two aspects: that of burning and that of giving light.

I want to be freed neither from human beings, nor from myself, nor from nature; for all these appear to me the greatest of miracles.

Science is not ... a perfect instrument, but it is a superb and invaluable tool that works harm only when taken as an end in itself.

In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential that we embody. If we do not embody that, life is wasted.

Whereas I formerly believed it to be my bounden duty to call other persons to order, I now admit that I need calling to order myself.

No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps. A nation has no honor, it has no word to keep.

I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life.

Our heart glows, and secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. Dealing with the unconscious has become a question of life for us.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

A special ability means a heavy expenditure of energy in a particular direction, with a consequent drain from some other side of life.

For, in order to turn the individual into a function of the State, his dependence on anything beside the State must be taken from him.

About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives.

No language exists that cannot be misused... Every Interpretation is hypothetical, for it is a mere attempt to read an unfamiliar text.

Thanks to the acuteness of his mind, he saw through the poverty of philosophical and Gnostic knowledge, and contemptuously rejected it.

Good does not become better by being exaggerated, but worse; And a small evil becomes a big one through being disregarded and repressed.

Instinct is like Nature herself - prodigiously conservative, and yet transcending her own historical conditions in her acts of creation.

Language, in its origin and essence, is simply a system of signs or symbols that denote real occurrences or their echo in the human soul.

Dreams are symbolic in order that they cannot be understood; in order that the wish, which is the source of the dream, may remain unknown.

When you come to think about it, nothing has any meaning, for when there was nobody to think, there was nobody to interpret what happened.

Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfill the way that is in you.

The educated man tries to repress the inferior one in himself, without realizing that by this he forces the latter to become revolutionary.

When an individual does not become conscious of their inner contradictions, the world acts out the conflict and is torn in opposite halves.

The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows it to realize its supreme purpose through him.

We don't so much solve our problems as we outgrow them. We add capacities and experiences that eventually make us bigger than the problems.

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.

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.

But the meaning of life is not . . . explained by one's business life, nor is the deep desire of the human heart answered by a bank account.

No dream symbol can be separated from the individual who dreams it, and there is no definite or straightforward interpretation of any dream.

Remember that the only God man comes in contact with is his own God, called Spirit, Soul and Mind, or Consciousness, and these three are one.

If only simplicity were not the most difficult of all things. It consists of watching objectively the development of any fragment of fantasy.

The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution born anew in the brain structure of every individual.

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

There are cases where psychoanalysis works worse than anything else. But who said that psychoanalysis was to be applied always and everywhere.

The growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement.

In each of us is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves.

The dream arises from a part of the mind unknown to us, but none the less important, and is concerned with the desires for the approaching day.

The spirit is the life of the body seen from within, and the body the outward manifestation of the life of the spirit-the two being really one.

My work as a psychoanalyst is to help patients recover their lost wholeness and to strengthen the psyche so it can resist future dismemberment.

Recognition of the reality of evil necessarily relativizes the good, and the evil likewise, converting both into halves of a paradoxical whole.

My evenings are taken up very largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth.

Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force

But we must not forget that only a very few people are artists in life; that the art of life is the most distinguished and rarest of all the arts.

The self as the essence of individuality is unitemporal and unique; as an archetypal symbol it is a God-image and therefore universal and eternal.

It is also possible for the unconscious or an archetype to take complete possession of a man and to determine his fate down to the smallest detail

One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is.

The separation of psychology from the premises of biology is purely artificial, because the human psyche lives in indissoluble union with the body.

I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once and cannot add up the sum.

Man positively needs general ideas and convictions that will give a meaning to his life and enable him to find a place for himself in the universe.

Share This Page