When language is used without true significance, it loses its purpose as a means of communication and becomes an end in itself.

It is our task-our essential, central, crucial task-to transform ourselves from mere social creatures into community creatures.

Until you are willing to be confused about what you already know, what you know will never grow bigger, better, or more useful.

To live in the past or in the future may be less satisfying than to live in the present, but it can never be as disillusioning.

Consciousness does not just passively reflect the objective material world; it plays an active role in creating reality itself.

To counter the avoidance of intellectual challenge and responsibility, we must reduce the domination of certainty in education.

Knowledge does not enrich us; it removes us more and more from the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth.

I agree with Stephen Covey that too many people spend too much time on doing what is urgent rather than on doing what is import.

The bad things don't seem to happen to bad people.' That's because they already did. There's no original evil left in the world.

The feeling of being valuable - 'I am a valuable person'- is essential to mental health and is a cornerstone of self-discipline.

The universe was a vast machine yesterday, it is a hologram today. Who knows what intellectual rattle we'll be shaking tomorrow.

Masturbation: the primary sexual activity of mankind. In the nineteenth century it was a disease; in the twentieth, it's a cure.

'Statistics' show that 66% of clients are cured with psychotherapy; what statistics don't show is that 72% are cured without it.

We don't focus as much in schools on educational knowledge which requires thinking and application, as we do on acquiring facts.

Too many of us fail to fulfill our needs because we say no rather than yes, or perhaps later in life, yes when we should say no.

Consciousness succumbs all too easily to unconscious influences, and these are often truer and wiser than our conscious thinking.

Psychiatrists classify a person as neurotic if he suffers from his problems in living, and a psychotic if he makes others suffer.

A lot of people don't know the brain is 85% water, so anything that dehydrates you like caffeine or alcohol is bad for the brain.

We must be willing to fail and to appreciate the truth that often "Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.

Coming to terms with the fear of death is conducive to healing, positive personality transformation, and consciousness evolution.

Labeling a child as mentally ill is stigmatization, not diagnosis. Giving a child a psychiatric drug is poisoning, not treatment.

Real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full.

Intuition is perception via the unconscious that brings forth ideas, images, new possibilities and ways out of blocked situations.

The divine process of change manifests itself to our human understanding . . . as punishment, torment, death, and transfiguration.

How can anyone see straight when he does not see himself and the darkness he unconsciously carries with him into all his dealings?

Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.

Insight that dawns slowly seems to me to have more lasting effects than a fitful idealism, which is unlikely to hold out for long.

Life presents us with repeated opportunities to face what we fear, what we need to become conscious of, or what we need to master.

If we know exactly where we're going, exactly how to get there, and exactly what we'll see along the way, we won't learn anything.

As for my dignity... the hell with my dignity. I will get along alright in this world. I don't have to be dignified, professional.

What do you do when you don't know what to do? No wonder there are more suicides among psychiatrists than in any other profession.

I spent much of my later childhood and adolescence very, very involved and interested in art, and particularly in animated movies.

If everyone could learn that what is right for me does not make it right for anyone else, the world would be a much happier place.

The creative person is constantly seeking to discover himself, to remodel his own identity, and to find meaning in what he creates.

The truth is, you cannot love yourself unless you have been loved and are loved. The capacity to love cannot be built in isolation.

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

When you are up against a wall, put down roots like a tree, until clarity comes from deeper sources to see over that wall and grow.

Like the sea itself, the unconscious yields an endless and self-replenishing abundance of creatures, a wealth beyond our fathoming.

What happens in the life of Christ happens always and everywhere. In the Christian archetype all lives of this kind are prefigured.

Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it.

I've told my children that when I die, to release balloons in the sky to celebrate that I graduated. For me, death is a graduation.

We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man.

Sometimes its said that psychiatrists are doctors who are frightened by the sight of blood. I might have fallen into that category.

Creativity does not depend on inherited talent or on environment or upbringing; it is the function of the ego of every human being.

A number of cases have been reported in which a dying individual has a vision of a person about whose death he or she did not know.

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

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.

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

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.

Share This Page