Psychotherapist Quotes

“We live in a world which in some respects is mysterious; things can be experienced which remain inexplicable; not everything which happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable.”

“Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.”

“The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole.”

“Your vision will be clearer only when you manage to see within your heart.”

“In the history of the collective as in the history of the individual, everything depends on the development of consciousness.”

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

“Only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the "treasure hard to attain." He alone has a genuine claim to self-confidence, for he has faced the dark ground of his self and thereby has gained himself. This experience gives him faith and trust.”

“Fidelity to the law of your own being is an act of high courage flung in the face of life.”

“The unconscious mind of man sees correctly even when conscious reason is blind and impotent.”

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

“The secret to Hitler's power is ... that his unconscious has exceptional access to his conscious and ... that he allows himself to be moved by it. [Others] have too much rationality, too much cerebrum to obey it [but] Hitler listens.”

“When one is not understood one should as a rule lower one's voice, because when one really speaks loudly enough and is not heard, it is because people do not want to hear. One had better begin to mutter to oneself, then they get curious.”

“People learn from who we are, rather than what we say, and to believe otherwise is a disease of the mind.”

“Even a lie is a psychic fact.”

“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.”

“The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life.”

“The psyche is a natural phenomenon. All aspects of the psyche, even those which seem pathological or destructive, actually serve the function of furthering our psychological development.”

“If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.”

“It is on the whole probably that we continually dream, but that consciousness makes such a noise that we do not hear it.”

“The only thing we have to fear on this planet is man.”

“Seldom, or perhaps never, does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain.”

“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.”

“Music is the application of sounds to the canvas of silence.”

“Creativity is the art that can give rise to visionary metaphorical relationships, as opposed to purely psy-chological ones.”

“Meaning makes a great many things endurable---per haps everything.”