Psychiatrist Quotes

“Be grateful for your difficulties and challenges, for they hold blessings. In fact... Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health personal growth, individuation and self-actualisation.”

“The wise man who is not heeded is counted a fool, and the fool who proclaims the general folly first and loudest passes for a prophet and Führer, and sometimes it is luckily the other way round as well, or else mankind would long since have perished of stupidity.”

“It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world color and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I can "experience" is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are . . . enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images.”

“Ultimate truth, if there be such a thing, demands the concert of many voices.”

“Free will is the ability to do gladly that which I must do.”

“Far from being a material world, this is a psychic world, which allows us to make only indirect and hypothetical inferences about the real nature of matter. The psychic, alone has immediate reality, and this includes all forms of the psychic, even”

“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.”

“A man's hatred is always concentrated upon that which makes him conscious of his bad qualities.”

“To the critical intelligence, nothing is left of absolute reality.”

“To become acquainted with oneself is a terrible shock.”

“All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes.”

“We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.”

“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.”

“What we lack is intensity of life.”

“Nature has no use for the plea that one 'did not know'.”

“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.”

“I have no theory about dreams. I do not know how dreams arise. On the other hand, I know that if we meditate on a dream sufficiently long and thoroughly – if we take the boat with us and turn it over and over – something almost always comes out of it.”

“Everything good is costly, and the development of personality is one of the most costly of all things. It is a matter of saying yes to oneself, of taking oneself as the most serious of tasks, of being conscious of everything one does, and keeping it constantly before one's eyes in all its dubious aspects.”

“The individual disposition is already a factor in childhood; it is innate, and not acquired in the course of a life.”

“But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yea the very fiend himself— that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved— what then?”

“Nothing affects the life of a child so much as the unlived life of its parent”

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

“The longing for light is the longing for consciousness.”

“Most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us.”

“Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.”