A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. They then dwell in the house next door, and at any moment a flame may dart out and set fire to his own house. Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.Collection: Giving Up
Your vision will be clearer only when you manage to see within your heart.Collection: Heart
The mass State has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual. The more unrelated individuals are, the more consolidated the State becomes, and vice versa.Collection: Men
The angel personifies something new arising from the deep unconscious.Collection: Inspiring
God has fallen out of containment in religion and into human hearts—God is incarnating. Our whole unconscious is in an uproar from the God Who wants to know and to be known.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Development
As soon as the dialogue between two people touches on something fundamental, essential, numinous, and a certain rapport is felt, it gives rise to a phenomenon which Lévy-Bruhl fittingly called participation mystique. It is an unconscious identity in which two individual psychic spheres interpenetrate to such a degree that it is impossible to say what belongs to whom.Collection: Psychics
The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents.Collection: Parenting
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.Collection: Responsibility
Six weeks after his death my father appeared to me in a dream... It was an unforgettable experience, and it forced me for the first time to think about life after death.Collection: Dream
I am this bundle of what has been, and what has been accomplished.Collection: Bundles
In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order... we are caught and entangled in aimless experience... Only when all props and crutches are broken, and no cover from the rear offers even the slightest hope of security, does it become possible for us to experience an archetype that up till then had lain hidden behind the meaningful nonsense played out by the anima. This is the archetype of meaning, just as the anima is the archetype of life itself.Collection: Order
My work as a psychoanalyst is to help patients recover their lost wholeness and to strengthen the psyche so it can resist future dismemberment.Collection: Helping
...The Western 'God-image' is a representation of the collective unconscious, an archetype of the psyche that undergoes a continual process of transformation...The God image evolves through its relationship to humanity. Whoever knows God has an effect on 'him'. For the individual, knowing God, is the process of recognizing and assimilating the pressured and paradoxical contents of the self, which come to consciousness- seek incarnation- within the ego.Collection: Knowing
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.Collection: Children
It is really the mistake of our age. We think it is enough to discover new things, but we don't realize that knowing more demands a corresponding development of morality.Collection: Mistake
Every Mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother and every mother extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter.Collection: Daughter
When goals go, meaning goes. When meaning goes, purpose goes. When purpose goes, life goes dead on our hands.Collection: Hands
Life calls not for perfection, but for completeness.Collection: Perfection
We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.Collection: Life
Embrace your grief. For there, your soul will grow.Collection: Grief
No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.Collection: Inspirational
Real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full.Collection: Real
If our religion is based on salvation, our chief emotions will be fear and trembling. If our religion is based on wonder, our chief emotion will be gratitude.Collection: Gratitude
We don't so much solve our problems as we outgrow them. We add capacities and experiences that eventually make us bigger than the problems.Collection: Add
The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.Collection: Inspirational
The most dangerous things in the world are immense accumulations of human beings who are manipulated by only a few heads.Collection: World
Wisdom accepts that all things have two sidesCollection: Two Sides
The whole point of Jesus's life was not that we should become exactly like him, but that we should become ourselves in the same way he became himself. Jesus was not the great exception but the great example.Collection: Jesus
If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely.Collection: Lonely
The most important question anyone can ask is: What myth am I living?Collection: Important
I cannot prove to you that God exists, but my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern in the individual has at its disposal the greatest transforming energies of which life is capable. Find this pattern in your own individual self and life is transformed.Collection: Men
Nothing is possible without love ... For love puts one in a mood to risk everything.Collection: Love
God enters through the wound.Collection: Grace
Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see.Collection: Eye
The sad truth is that man's real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites - day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end.Collection: Pain
A man's hatred is always concentrated upon that which makes him conscious of his bad qualities.Collection: Men
Nothing affects the life of a child so much as the unlived life of its parentCollection: Children
In order to know the light, we must first experience the darkness.Collection: Light
Trust that which gives you meaning and accept it as your guideCollection: Giving
You always become the thing you fight the most.Collection: Fighting
Normality is a fine ideal for those who have no imagination.Collection: Imagination
All fanaticism is repressed doubt.Collection: Doubt
Intuition is one of the four basic psychological functions along with thinking, feeling,and sensing.Collection: Thinking
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.Collection: Inspirational
Conflict exists strictly as an opportunity to raise our consciousness.Collection: Opportunity
Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.Collection: Life
Every human life contains a potential, if that potential is not fulfilled, then that life was wasted.Collection: Inspirational