Psychotherapist Quotes

“Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of awareness of darkness... as the contrast between what we have and how it could be worse is vital to appreciate anything, including our life, and so be happy and grateful”

“I have always tried to make room for anything that wanted to come to me from within.”

“Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.”

“The person who looks outward dreams, the person who looks inward awakens.”

“Unfortunately, there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and darker it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it”

“When facts are few, speculations are most likely to represent individual psychology.”

“The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.”

“It is just man's turning away from instinct--his opposing himself to instinct--that creates consciousness. Instinct is nature andseeks to perpetuate nature; while consciousness can only seek culture or its denial.”

“No one can flatter himself that he is immune to the spirit of his own epoch, or even that he possesses a full understanding of it. Irrespective of our conscious convictions, each one of us, without exception, being a particle of the general mass, is somewhere attached to, colored by, or even undermined by the spirit which goes through the mass. Freedom stretches only as far as the limits of our consciousness.”

“A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon.”

“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.”

“Every victory contains the germ of future defeat.”

“...The unconscious has no time. There is no trouble about time in the unconscious. Part of our psyche is not in time and not in space. They are only an illusion, time and space, and so in a certain part of our psyche time does not exist at all.”

“Sometimes you have to do something unforgivable just to be able to go on living.”

“If you want to understand the jungle, you can't be content just to sail back and forth near the shore. You've got to get into it, no matter how strange and frightening it might seem.”

“Naturally, every age thinks that all ages before it were prejudiced, and today we think this more than ever and are just as wrong as all previous ages that thought so. How often have we not seen the truth condemned! It is sad but unfortunately true that man learns nothing from history.”

“No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps. A nation has no honor, it has no word to keep.”

“Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and considered by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being.”

“Nothing worse could happen to one than to be completely understood.”

“We do not feel as if we were producing the dreams, it is rather as if the dreams came to us. They are not subject to our control but obey their own laws.”

“Everyone you meet knows something you don't know but need to know. Learn from them.”

“The experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego.”

“You must live life in such a spirit that you make in every moment the best of possibilities.”

“From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.”

“Envy does not allow humanity to sleep.”