Browsing Topic Best Memories Dreams Reflections Quotes

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.

We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

In each of us there is another whom we do not know.

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness.

The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.

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.

The sure path can only lead to death.

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.

In actual life it requires the greatest discipline to be simple, and the acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook upon life.

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.

Nature has no use for the plea that one ‘did not know’.

Warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.

A shoe that fits one person pinches another.

The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends.

I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life – that is to say, over 35 – there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.

I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it.

The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. It is therefore short-sighted to treat fantasy, on account of its risky or unacceptable nature, as a thing of little worth.

The sight of a child…will arouse certain longings in adult, civilized persons — longings which relate to the unfulfilled desires and needs of those parts of the personality which have been blotted out of the total picture in favor of the adapted persona.

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.

I deliberately and consciously give preference to a dramatic, mythological way of thinking and speaking, because this is not only more expressive but also more exact than an abstract scientific terminology, which is wont to toy with the notion that its theoretic formulations may one fine day be resolved into algebraic equations.

Even if the whole world were to fall to pieces, the unity of the psyche would never be shattered.

We have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.

What we do not make conscious emerges later as fate.

Every father is given the opportunity to corrupt his daughter’s nature, and the educator, husband, or psychiatrist then has to face the music. For what has been spoiled by the father can only be made good by a father, just as what has been spoiled by the mother can only be repaired by a mother. The disastrous repetition of the family pattern could be described as the psychological original sin, or as the curse of the Atrides running through the generations.

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.

The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith.

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

Primitive superstition lies just below the surface of even the most tough-minded individuals, and it is precisely those who most fight against it who are the first to succumb to its suggestive effects.