Psychiatrist Quotes

“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.”

“Life is something that has to be lived and not talked about.”

“We are a psychic process which we do not control, or only partly direct. Consequently, we cannot have any final judgment about ourselves or our lives.”

“If you are unhappy, you are too high up in your mind.”

“The world will ask you who you are, and if you don't know, the world will tell you.”

“Man cannot stand a meaningless life.”

“Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The "newness" in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components.”

“Too much of the animal disfigures the civilized human being, too much culture makes a sick animal.”

“Protection and security are only valuable if they do not cramp life excessively.”

“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. It may help us to escape all criticism, we may even be able to deceive ourselves in the belief of our obvious righteousness. But deep down, below the surface of the average man's conscience, he hears a voice whispering, 'There is something not right,' no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or by the moral code.”

“It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else. Nothing has a more diverse and alienating effect upon society than this moral complacency and lack of responsibility, and nothing promotes understanding and rapprochement more than the mutual withdrawal of projections.”

“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. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance. Indeed, self-knowledge as a psychotherapuetic measure frequently requires much painstaking work extending over a long period of time.”

“Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands.”

“Active imagination requires a state of reverie, half-way between sleep and waking.”

“The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents.”

“Shrinking away from death is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.”

“I believe that history is capable of anything. There exists no folly that men have not tried out.”

“An archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors.”

“The true leader is always led.”

“An old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as the young man who is unable to embrace it.”

“In each of us there 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. When, therefore, we find ourselves in a difficult situation to which there is no solution, he can sometimes kindle a light that radically alters our attitude - the very attitude that led us into the difficult situation.”

“The collective unconscious consists of the sum of the instincts and their correlates, the archetypes. Just as everybody possesses instincts, so he also possesses a stock of archetypal images.”

“In order to know the light, we must first experience the darkness.”

“Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books.”

“As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.”