Quotes by Carl Gustav Jung

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Art is innate in the artist as an instinct that takes possession of him and makes man his instrument.

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To be is to do and to create.

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I never force anyone if they don't want to go their own way and take responsibility. I'm not willing to make the cheap assumption that it's just plain defiance. Defiance - especially if it is stubborn - deserves attention, because it is often a kind of warning sign that should not be ignored. The healing element can be poison, which not everyone can tolerate, or an operation that ends in death, if something is against it. When it comes to the most personal thing, the inner experience, most people get scared and many run away.

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Our spiritual development is only possible if we accept ourselves as we are and try to seriously live the life entrusted to us.

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Man must face the problem of suffering. Eastern man tries to get rid of suffering by ignoring it. Western man tries to eliminate suffering with drugs. However, suffering must be overcome, and it can only be overcome by enduring it.

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I'm afraid that even revealed truth needs to evolve. Everything that lives changes. We should not be satisfied with immutable traditions.

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Love is not a cheap thing, and we must guard against making it cheap ourselves. Our bad qualities - our egoism, our cowardice, our so-called experience, our shyness - all try to convince us not to take love seriously. However, love only rewards us if we take it seriously.

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We don't have secrets, but real secrets own us.

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The criterion of adulthood (...) is not that one belongs to a sect, group or nation, but that one can submit to the spirit of one's own independence.

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If a person follows the path of individuation, if he lives life, then he must also reckon with error, otherwise life would not be complete. There is no guarantee - at any moment - that we will not make a mistake or be in mortal danger. One might think there is a sure way. However, this would be the way of the dead. Then nothing happens anymore, or it doesn't happen the right way. He who is on a safe path is actually dead.

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A true personality always has a destiny and believes in it... If someone has a destiny, its original meaning is: a voice spoke to him and ordered him to do something.

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If you are lonely, it is because you isolate yourself; if you are humble enough, you will never be lonely. Nothing insulates us more than power and prestige. Try to lower yourself among people, learn modesty, and you will never be alone!

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The man who has not visited the hell of his passions has never overcome them.

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It is important to have some kind of secret and to guess that there are things that cannot be known. This fills life with some impersonality, a kind of numinousness. Those who have never experienced it have missed something important. One must feel that one lives in a mysterious world in a certain way, in which things can happen and be experienced that can never be explained, not just things that happen as expected. This world includes the unexpected and the unheard of. That's the only way life is complete.

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Life needs completeness, not perfection, to be fulfilled. This includes the thorn piercing the flesh, the suffering of our imperfection, without which there is no way forward or back.

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It is a remarkable paradox of human life that what we fear the most is the source of the greatest wisdom. Our greatest folly is our best starting point. No one can become wise without being terribly stupid. We learn truth through eros, virtue through sin.

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I have always felt that life is like a plant that lives from its roots. Its actual life is invisible, hidden deep in the rhizome. Everything that is visible above the ground only lasts for one summer. Then it withers - an ephemeral phenomenon. When one thinks of the endless formation and passing away of life and cultures, one is filled with the thought of absolute nothingness; however, I have never ceased to feel that something lives and remains beneath the eternal change. What we see: the flower, and that is ephemeral. The rhizome remains.

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Our individual lives are not an illusion. It has the same validity.

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I have come to the observation that a purposeful life is generally better, richer, healthier than an aimless one, and it is better to move forward with time than to step back against time.

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To heal is to make whole. What is whole is not perfect, but complete.

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Before we strive for perfection, we should be able to live the life of an ordinary person without allowing our essence to be crippled. Those who have reached their full potential within these modest frameworks and believe that they still have enough energy, should start their career as a saint. I never felt called to help with this.

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What is the big dream? A big dream consists of many small dreams and many acts of humility, of surrendering to the signs of the dream. The big dream is the image of the future and the new world that we do not yet understand.

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Precisely because the most devoted and loyal love is also the most beautiful, we should never wonder what could make love easy.

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The smallest thing, if it has meaning, is always more worth living for than the biggest without meaning.

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If man has compared himself and does not know this, he has illusions; however, if he knows that he is like himself, he has reached the stage of individuation. According to Schopenhauer, humor is the only divine quality of man.

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It is sheer recklessness to imagine that we can always tell what is good or bad for the patient. Maybe something is really wrong for him, but he does it anyway, for which he also feels remorse. This can be very good for the person - medically speaking, so experientially. Perhaps he has to experience evil, suffering its power, because only then can he finally give up his Pharisaism towards others. Perhaps it is fate itself or the unconscious, or God - call it whatever you want - it is a good idea to push it into the filth, because only such a powerful experience will conceive it, it helps to strip off its childishness and makes it more mature.

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We have to learn directly that something good can be bad and something bad can be good. If you think good, you must take it in the sense of relativity. (...) From a psychological point of view, good is always good compared to something bad. Originally, this sense of good and bad marked favorable or unfavorable. For example, a tribal chief was once asked: what is the difference between good and bad. He replied: if I kidnap my enemy's wife for myself, that is good. But if another chief kidnaps my wife, then that is bad. Thus, they do not differentiate between the moral and the immoral, but between favorable and unfavorable. The superstitious attitude always asks: is it favorable? At this point, the intellect is quite attentive. The concept of morality, on the other hand, was created very late.

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People repeatedly forget that what was once good does not remain good forever. He is just retracing his old ways, which used to lead him in the right direction. Then, only at the cost of the greatest sacrifices, in the midst of bitter troubles, can he come to terms with the fact that the old good is perhaps already outdated and no longer good. And so it is with both small and large.

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In all chaos there is also cosmos (beauty, order, decency), in all disorder lies order, and in all arbitrariness there is always law, because everything that works is based on opposites. Discerning human intelligence is needed to recognize this.

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I have good reason to believe that things do not end with death. Life seems like an interlude in a long story.

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Death is as important to the soul as birth, and just like birth, it is an integral part of life.

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When a person can renounce the terrible will to live, and feels as if he is falling into a bottomless fog, then his real life begins with everything he was destined for and that he never achieved. This is something unspeakably great.

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Doubt is the crown of life, because it contains both truth and error. Doubt is life, reality is sometimes death and stagnation. When we doubt, we have the greatest chance to combine the dark and light sides of life.

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The last vestige of something divine is man's honest effort.

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The wholeness of life requires a balance between happiness and suffering. Because suffering is extremely uncomfortable, one naturally shrinks from acknowledging how much anxiety and worry one has been created for. That's why we constantly soothe ourselves with the promise of improvement or the hope of happiness that will certainly arrive, without thinking that happiness is also poisoned if we have not yet drunk the cup of suffering.

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It is very typical of us humans that as long as things are pending and we still have a chance to drag it on and on, we always hope to find the good around the nearest street corner, and therefore we never insist on being happy where we are. we are right now. But as soon as we agree and believe that success is now certain, we are standing in front of a brick wall. Luck does not turn to us, and in fact it waits for us, causing quite a bit of tension. And this is when we regretfully think back to the past, when we could still run away and disappear somewhere among the clouds floating on the horizon. This is how we always promise ourselves new countries, new chances, wonderful things, and we chase our dreams further and further, while living a makeshift life.

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The meaning of my existence is that life asked me a question. Or vice versa: I myself am the question addressed to the world, and I must present my own answer, otherwise I can only rely on the world's answer. This is the life task above the person, which I can only achieve with difficulty.

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From a human point of view, the crucial question sounds like this: do you accept infinity or not? This is the criterion of his life. I don't waste my interest on trifles and things of little importance only when I know that the limitless is the point. If I do not know this, then for the sake of this or that quality, which I regard as my personal good, I insist on being of importance to someone in the world. So, say, because of my talent or my beauty. The stronger a person clings to his perceived possessions, and the less he feels the essence, the less satisfying his life is. You feel limited because your intentions are limited, and this gives rise to envy and jealousy. Desires and attitudes also change if we understand and feel that we have already connected to the limitless in this life. At the end of the day, you only count for what you have, and if you don't have that, you've messed up your life. The decisive factor in the relationship with the other person is whether the limitless is expressed in him or not.

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The worrisome contamination of the waters, the slowly increasing radioactivity, and the vague danger of overpopulation, which gives rise to genocidal tendencies, have already led to widespread - although not universally conscious - fear; people love noise because it prevents these phenomena from being discussed.

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Appearance is sometimes as successful as real performance.

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The world situation has reached such a point that even the most moving words no longer mean anything. It seems that now it is much more important that each of us is sure of our attitude. However, the individual who believes that his voice is heard far away only makes it likely that he is among those who also said something to prove to themselves that they did something, when in fact they did nothing. Words have become too cheap. Existence is more difficult, and therefore they gladly replace it with words.

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There is something seductive about identification with office and title, which causes many men to become nothing more than their society-voted dignity. It would be futile to look for a personality behind this shell. Behind the parade cat, we would only find a pitiful person. This is why office (or the outer shell at any given time) is so tempting: because it is cheap compensation for personal disabilities.

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We have grown in knowledge, but not in wisdom.

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The woman knows more and more that she can only achieve fuller self-realization through love, as the man begins to guess that only the spirit gives true meaning to his life, and basically both are looking for a mutual spiritual connection, because the love of the spirit and the spirit of love it requires fulfillment.

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I believe that suffering is an essential part of human life, without which we would be completely incapable of action. We always try to avoid suffering. We experiment a thousand and a thousand ways, but we never quite succeed. That is why I have come to the conclusion that we should definitely find at least one way that allows people to endure the inevitable suffering that is the class part of every human being. Anyone who has achieved at least enough to be able to endure suffering has already completed an almost superhuman task. This can give you some degree of joy or satisfaction. If you call that happiness, I wouldn't have much objection to it.

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Those who do not understand the hints of life will sooner or later find themselves full.

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The absence of reason hinders the fulfillment of life. A lot of things, maybe everything is tolerable if it makes sense.

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A person whose heart has not changed will not change anyone else's heart.

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Love reveals its most hidden secrets and wonders only to those who are capable of unconditional devotion and emotional loyalty.

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Getting to know yourself is an adventure that leads to unexpected distances and depths.

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We are unable to live with things as they are. Opinions are more important to us than real life, and we tend to believe words more than facts.

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Only after the illness did I understand how important it is to say yes to our own destiny. Because in this way a self is created that does not fail even when something unfathomable happens to it. A me that perseveres, endures the truth and copes with the world and fate. Then even defeat can be forged into victory. Nothing tangles - neither outside nor inside; for our own continuity has withstood the tide of life and time. But this only happens if one does not intrusively interfere in the plans of fate.

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The world we are born into is harsh and horrible, but also divinely beautiful. It is a matter of moderation, who believes what prevails: nonsense or sense. If meaninglessness were to prevail to an absolute extent, then at a higher level of development, the meaning of life would cease to an ever greater extent. But that's not the case - at least in my opinion. As with all metaphysical questions, both are probably true: life is sense and senselessness, or it is full of sense and senselessness. And I anxiously hope that reason will prevail and win the battle.

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There is a beautiful, old story about a rabbi who was asked by one of his students: Before there were people who saw God face to face; why aren't there any today? To which the rabbi replied: Because today no one can stoop that low. Sure, we have to bend down a bit if we want to draw from the stream.

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I admit, it's not easy to find the right form, but when we find it, we manage to make something whole out of ourselves, and I think that's the meaning of life.

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It's all well and good if you feel dependent on the whole world, but that's not the point. The bottom line is that you are not an addict and you should start feeling like one. The feeling of dependence is merely an evasive maneuver. You paralyze yourself with this kind of attitude, and because of this you cannot stand on your own two feet. The true path is your own path, and you must commit to walking that path. That would get you to some goal.

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Life is only ignited by the opposite.

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Passionate desire has two sides: it is the force that beautifies everything, and that, under certain circumstances, destroys everything. (...) Passion creates destinies, and thus brings about something irreversible.

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Where love reigns, there is no lust for power, and where power is paramount, there is no trace of love.

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Love is one of the great powers of destiny, whose dominion extends from heaven to hell.

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Undertaking personality development is actually an unpopular audacity, a distasteful deviation from the broad path, an eccentric hermit - just as the outsider likes to imagine it. It is no wonder, then, that only a few people were tempted by this strange adventure from the beginning.

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There is no one who develops his personality because someone has told him that it is useful or advisable to do so. Nature has never been so deeply impressed by well-intentioned suggestions. Only causally acting compulsion moves nature, including humans. (...) In this way, the development of the personality does not obey any wish, command, or insight, but only disaster; it cannot do without the motivating compulsion of internal and external destinies.

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For me, the main meaning of existence can only be that it exists, not that it does not exist or no longer exists.

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But when suffering worsens, conditions often change in an instant. Then the person looks around with a searching eye: where is the way out, and begins to think about the meaning of life and the moving experiences, and everything that goes along with them.

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Indeed, it is a sad fact that our world and life are made up of inexorable opposites: day and night, prosperity and suffering, birth and death, good and bad. We are not even sure that one equals the other, good equals bad, or pleasure equals pain. Life and the world: a battlefield, it has always been this way, it will not be any different, and if it was, existence would soon be over. A balanced state does not exist anywhere.

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Suffering, as master Eckhart says, is the fastest road that takes you to perfection. Greater awareness is a satisfying response to suffering, which would otherwise be meaningless and therefore unbearable. The revelation of the well-intentioned divine will cannot eliminate the suffering in man due to imperfect creation, but it can soothe it and fill it with meaning.

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In what is useful, man can show huge achievements, but he has also crossed the world gap, and where will he, where can he still stop?

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Man misses the meaning of his life to the extent that he is unfaithful to his own law, and thus does not become a personality. Fortunately, the kind and long-suffering nature of most of us has never bothered us to say: what is the meaning of our lives.

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We have to live certain things in life as if they were meant to be a ripe fruit, and if they are not worth it, then we drop them. We have to perceive them playfully, in a childlike way, without prejudices. As soon as we have prejudices, we exclude certain possibilities, and our lives are no longer rich.

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Life and spirit are two powers or necessities between which man is wedged. The spirit gives his life its meaning and the possibility of the greatest development. However, life is essential for the spirit, because its truth is worthless if it cannot live it out.

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Big life problems can never be solved forever. And once they seem to be resolved, it's always a loss. Their meaning and purpose - it seems - lies not in their solution, but in the fact that we work on them incessantly. This is the only thing that protects you from becoming dumb and petrified.

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Some men are guilty sinners. Such people believe in rational things because life has shown them what they are worth; they earned a lot of money by rational means, and of course they believe in it; they believe that everything can be bought. That's why they're so hypochondriacs. I recently saw such a case. A great businessman collapsed and fabricated hypochondriac theories; he kept traveling the world to find a doctor who could cure him. He believed that his illness could definitely be cured, since everything can be bought, and therefore there must be such a great doctor somewhere. He assured me that he would pay any fee if I treated him. I could ask for as much money as I want. According to him, the matter can be settled with money, and if it is not, it is only because the money offered is not enough. I also remember another rich man who did not believe in death. He also believed that life can be bought and that his relative, who suffered from an incurable disease, should not die. As if no one should die if you pay the best doctors and hospitals because you can afford to stay alive.

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Everything I learned and got to know brought me step by step closer to God. Today I have an unshakable conviction that there is a Providence. I only believe in what I know for sure. This eliminates the need for faith. Therefore, I do not say that I believe in the existence of God - I know that He exists.

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Man must live in harmony with his own nature. To do this, you must first get to know yourself, and then adjust your life to the recognized truths. How about a vegetarian tiger, for example? You'd probably say it's a tiger to beat.

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A person (...) can only choose his own path if he considers it to be the best for him. If he considered some other path better, he would live and develop it instead of his own path. The other ways are conventions of a moral, social, political, philosophical and religious nature. The fact that conventions always flourish in some form proves that the overwhelming majority of people do not choose their own path, but the convention, and as a result they develop not themselves, but a method, and with it a collective at the expense of their own completeness.

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When I first visited North America, I was shocked to find that there were no barriers at railroad crossings or guardrails along the tracks. In remote areas, the rails were even used as footpaths. When I voiced my astonishment, I received the following response: only a fool does not know that trains run on the tracks at a speed of between forty and a hundred miles. It also became apparent that nothing is forbidden, but simply not allowed, since people were asked in the most polite way to please don`t... These and similar impressions of mine were condensed into my realization that in American public life, intelligence they appeal and expect; In Europe, however, they are based on stupidity. America demands and supports common sense, while Europe looks back to see if the dumb are keeping up. In fact, the situation is even worse: the European continent assumes evil, and therefore shouts the commanding and intrusive forbidden to everyone, while America turns to good intentions.

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Perhaps many people admit that self-knowledge and common sense are necessary, but only very few consider these needs to be mandatory for themselves.

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The problem of love is one of the great sufferings of humanity, and no one should be ashamed of the fact that he too pays his share.

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I marvel at myself, I am disappointed in myself, I am happy with myself. I am sad, depressed, uplifted. It's all me, but I can't sum it up myself. I am unable to establish any conclusive value or worthlessness, I cannot judge myself and my life.

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All my writing is, so to speak, an internal assignment; they were all created as a result of fateful compulsion. What I wrote attacked me from within. I spoke to the spirit that moves me. I never expected that my writing would be so popular. They all represent a compensation for my contemporary world, and I had to say what no one wants to hear. That's why I felt myself, my situation, especially at first, so hopeless. I knew that people would react negatively because it is difficult to accept the compensation of the conscious world. Today I can say: my success is a real miracle, more than I ever expected. But the main thing I always thought was that I said what I had to say. I feel like I did my best. Of course, this could have been more and better, but not according to my ability.

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We cannot pull people out of the hands of their fate, just as in medicine we cannot cure a patient whom nature has destined to die.

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To empty the full cup nicely, who could do that?

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However, there is also an attainable goal, and that is the development and maturation of the individual personality. And since we are convinced that the individual is the bearer of life, we served life if we succeeded in making even one tree fruitful among the thousand that remained unfruitful. However, those who try to nurture everything that wants to grow will soon find that weeds always grow the fastest and soon cover everything. That is why I think that the noblest task of psychology in our time is to serve the goal of the development of the individual without interruption. Our efforts follow the efforts of nature in that the individual can develop the fullness of his life, since life can only find its meaning in the individual, not in a bird sulking in a gilded cage.

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I have often found that accepting unsatisfactory or incorrect answers to life's questions makes certain people neurotic. What they want: job, marriage, reputation, and external success and money, but they remain unhappy and neurotic even if they have achieved everything they wanted. Such people are mostly in a kind of spiritual misery. Their lives have no sufficient content, no meaning. As soon as they manage to develop into a broader personality, their neurosis also disappears. That is why I attached great importance to the idea of ​​development from the beginning.

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Personality develops throughout life, from germ structures that are hard to explain or not at all, and only what we do will show who we are. We are like the sun that nourishes the life of the earth and brings out all kinds of beautiful, strange and evil; we are like mothers who carry unknown happiness and suffering in their wombs. At first, we don't know what constructive or evil actions, what fate, what good or bad is being prepared in us; only autumn shows what spring has brought forth, and only in the evening will it be clear what the morning has begun.

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We, humans, live our own personal lives, but on the other hand, we are to a large extent the representatives, victims and promoters of a collective spirit whose age we count in centuries. It is true, we can even imagine for a whole life that we are going after our own heads and never realize that we were only extras in the main plot on the stage of the world theater. However, there are facts that, although we do not know them, still influence our lives, and the effect only increases if it is not conscious. The more rejecting the mind's attitude towards the unconscious, the more dangerous the latter becomes.

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There is no doubt in the herd, and the larger crowd always has the better truth - but the bigger disasters are also rooted in it.

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The actual mass man does not see anything in principle, and he does not need it at all, because the only one who can make a mistake is the great Anonymous, which is conventionally called "state" or "society".

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As far as we can discern, the only purpose of human existence is to shine light in the darkness of mere existence. In fact, it can be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, the growth of our consciousness affects the unconscious in the same way.

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The difference between me and most people is that my public walls are transparent. This is my individual characteristic. In others, they are often so impenetrable that they see nothing of what is behind them, and therefore believe that there is nothing there. I can kind of sense what's going on in the background. This is where my inner security comes from. He who sees nothing lacks security and cannot draw conclusions or does not trust his own conclusions.

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A humanity without mythology is a simple statistic, an average. Our natural science works with large averages, breaks everything down to averages, but the truth is that life is carried on by flesh-and-blood human beings and not by numbers. Statistics kill all unique characteristics from life, which is extremely depressing and unhealthy. It deprives people of their self-esteem, their most important life experiences, through which they can experience their own values ​​and the creative power of their personality.

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Everything that irritates us in others helps us to understand ourselves.

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There is no happy life without a little darkness. Happiness means nothing if it is not offset by sorrow. There is no yang without yin.

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There are just as many days as there are nights, and one is as long as the other, year after year. Even a happy life cannot be without some darkness, even the word "happiness" would lose its meaning if it were not offset by sadness.

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Anthropologists have often described what happens when the spiritual values ​​of some primitive social order are exposed to the onslaught of modern civilization. People lose faith in the meaning of their lives, their social order breaks down, and they themselves become morally ruined. We are in the same situation today. But we never understood what we lost.

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No matter how proud we are of ruling over nature, we are still victims of nature because we have not yet learned to control ourselves. We are slowly but seemingly inexorably moving towards destruction.

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The shoes that are good for one person are uncomfortable for another, that is, there is no generally valid recipe for life.

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We need our sins, our mistakes, our mistakes, otherwise we would lose the most valuable incentives for our development.

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Sometimes the real question is whether we should save a person from the fate he has to go through in order to develop. Some people cannot be saved from committing terrible inabilities because they are in their nature. If I take these away from them, they lose their values.

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Consciousness moves within a narrow framework, squeezed into a short period of time between the beginning and the end, which is also shortened by about a third by periodic sleep. The life of the body lasts somewhat longer, always begins earlier and very often ends later than consciousness.

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Beginnings and endings are an inevitable aspect of every process. But it is extremely difficult to determine where something begins and where it ends, since events and processes, beginnings and endings form a continuum that cannot be divided anywhere in the exact sense of the word.

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Show me a sane person and I'll cure him of it.

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Until the unconscious becomes conscious, your subconscious will rule your life and you will call it destiny.

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I am not what happened to me. I am what I want to become.

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Thinking is hard, so we mostly judge.

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If we want to change something in a child, we must first check if it is not something that needs to be changed in ourselves.

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Your vision clears as you look into your heart.

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Man does not hear sounds from stones, plants, or animals, nor does he believe that they hear him when he speaks to them. His connection with nature ceased, and with it the deep emotional energy that this connection had nourished.

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What you resist not only persists, but grows even bigger.

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A shoe that fits one person's foot perfectly will squeeze another's. We were all born differently, with different tasks that cannot be replaced by anything.

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Only emotions can transform darkness into light and apathy into action.

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The crowd believes and does not think.

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Origination and passing away form the same curve.

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According to my experience, it is precisely those young people who are afraid of life who later suffer from the fear of death.

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In psychology, it is very important that the doctor does not try to cure at all costs. You must be extremely careful not to impose your own will and beliefs on the patient. You have to give him some freedom.

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The unconscious is like a compass, it doesn't tell us what to do. If we can't read the compass, if we don't align with it, it can't help us.

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Nature makes no suggestions to anyone.

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Dreams prepare you for certain situations, give you news about them or warn you against them, often before they become real facts.

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It is deadly for the soul to become unconscious. People die even before the death of the body, because death lurks in their souls. They are larva-like leeches wandering around like ghosts, dead but still sucking blood.

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There are people who manage not to take life seriously, as if they were born to be children forever.

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If a young person is afraid of the world, of life, of the future, everyone considers it regrettable, unwise, neurotic; such a person is said to shy away from everything. But if an aging person feels a secret shudder, even a fear of death, at the thought that his reasonable life expectancy will be only so many years, then we are painfully reminded of certain feelings within ourselves; we divert our attention as much as possible and divert the conversation to another topic. The optimism with which we judged the young man fails here.

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Death (...) is the point that often closes the sentence before its completion, and after that only some memory or after-effect remains in others.

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Neurosis is the comparison of a person with himself.

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People feel the temptation, they want it and they don't want it. And because they don't want to and can't figure out what they actually want, their conflict is largely unconscious, and that's what causes neurosis.

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Scientific reason has excluded man from our world. Man stands isolated in the cosmos. He is no longer intertwined with nature, he is no longer emotionally involved in the natural events that used to be of symbolic importance to him. Thunder is no longer God's voice, nor is lightning his avenging cannonball. The river is not inhabited by a spirit, the tree does not represent human life, the snake is not the embodiment of wisdom, and the mountain is not inhabited by some great demon. Things no longer speak to us, and we do not speak to things as we do to stones, springs, plants or animals.

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The whole point of sin is to bear it. What good is a sin if we can just shake it off? If we are thoroughly aware of our sin, we must bear it, carry it, live with it, we are one with it.

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Those for whom we would have wished a long life, death seizes them in the prime of their lives, and those who demand nothing reach a great age. This is a cruel reality, it is not good to deceive ourselves.

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The big decisions of human life are usually much more subject to instincts and other mysterious, unconscious factors than to conscious will or well-intentioned wisdom.

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Although nature itself destroys what it has built, it then rebuilds it.

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We must be able to say about certain things, "I will try, even if I am convinced that it may be wrong." Only if we live like this can we do something with life.

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Only he can rise above nature who bears the earthly burden instead. How would Plato have philosophized if he had been his own house slave? How would Jesus, the rabbi, have taught if he had to support his wife and children? If he should have cultivated the ground on which the bread grew, which he broke afterwards; if he had to hoe the grapes in which the wine ripened, which he distributed?

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Every time we come into contact with nature, we become pure. Wild animals aren't dirty - only we are. Domesticated animals are dirty, but wild animals never are.

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The process of culture is nothing but the ever-increasing restraint of the animal in man; it is a domestication process that cannot be realized without the rebellions of the animal nature that craves freedom.

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What is the use of a morality that destroys and breaks a person?

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The more blind love is, the more it is subordinated to instincts and the more it threatens with destructive consequences, since love is a driving force that needs form and direction.

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We are all like a tiny liver cell that has migrated from its place. The tiny liver cell spins and travels through all kinds of tissues. He reaches the brain and says: "This is a very pleasant, elevated place, the air is good here," but his neighbors retort: ​​"Get out of here, you don't belong here!" and push the tiny cell away; and it travels further to the lungs, where it meets the same fate as it did just now. He says: "The world is very evil, no one understands me." If you understood yourself, you would know that you don't belong there!

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A person can become addicted to a rapture if he does not understand in time why he became raptured. You should ask yourself once: Why is this thought so attached to me? What does this mean for me? Such modest doubt can save us from being completely and forever addicted to our own ideas.

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There is always a flaw in the crystal. We will never achieve perfection.

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The awakening of the spiritual life is accompanied by problems and sufferings.

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Everyone suffers while swimming in the chaotic current of life.

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Conflicts are never resolved by clever tricks or intelligent lies; to be resolved, they must be endured until the tension becomes unbearable; then the pairs of opposites slowly merge into one. It is a kind of alchemical process, not a rational choice or decision. Suffering is essential. All real solutions are found only through intense suffering. Suffering shows how unbearable we are to ourselves. Match your enemy! - with the exterior and the interior! This is the problem!

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Just as the body needs food, and not just any kind, but only what is suitable for it, so the psyche also needs the meaning of its existence.

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Life's big problems cannot be solved, you have to survive.

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And yet there is so much that fills me with wonder: plants, animals, clouds, day and night, and the eternal essence of man. The more insecure I became about myself, the stronger I felt a kinship with things. Yes, I feel as if the strangeness that has so long separated me from the world has moved into my inner world and has unexpectedly declared that I am unknown to myself.

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A thing born at a particular time carries all the characteristics of that moment.

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He who looks outside is dreaming. Those who look inward will wake up.

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Life can only have its meaning in the individual person.

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A seemingly unbearable conflict proves that you are living right. A life without internal contradictions is either only half a life, or an afterlife, but that belongs only to angels. But God loves men more than angels.

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People tend to be attached to their past and remain captive to the illusion of youth. Being old is extremely unpopular. They don't seem to consider that not being able to grow old is as stupid as not being able to outgrow your children's shoes. A thirty-year-old man who is still infantile is, of course, to be pitied, but a youthful seventy-year-old, they say, isn't he charming? However, both are perverse, tasteless things, psychological unnaturalness. The young man who does not fight and does not win misses the benefits of his youth, and the old man who cannot pay attention to the secrets of the streams flowing from the mountain tops into the valleys is a mindless, veritable spiritual mummy, nothing more than a frozen past. It remains outside of its own life, repeating itself like a machine until it becomes completely worn out. What a culture that demands such nuances!

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Man is man's worst enemy. The Creator must not look kindly on the fact that man's Luciferian flame mind condensed such an overwhelming force into the hydrogen bomb, which can carry out a more destructive killing than any previous divine retribution. We must learn about human nature before every Jekyll discovers its Hyde.

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Today, it is no longer possible to have a meaningful conversation in a hotel or restaurant during lunch or over a cup of tea, because our words are swallowed up by the music. I recently sat down to talk with an American professor in a New York hotel. But it didn't work out, we finally gave up. I have no objection to music in its place and time, but nowadays it almost haunts you. (...) But it's even worse if they play classics as background music, say Bach. Bach converses with God, and his music completely captivates you. But I could beat the one who plays Bach in a banal setting.

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The needs and compulsions that drive people are different. What is salvation for one is prison for the other.

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Medical authority can get by with credulous people, but to the critical eye, such success always seems tinsel. This also resulted in the fact that the authority of the forerunners of the doctor-psychotherapists, the priests, was also greatly damaged - especially among the more educated people. The more difficult cases are nothing more than human trials, both for the patient and for the doctor.

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Only those who can build should destroy.

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In life, it is not at all important that one is right, but that one's own business comes first.

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Life is over in one or two, and after that we get nothing, whether we were happy or sad.

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We attribute purpose and meaning to the ascending branch of life, but why not to the descending branch? A person's birth is pregnant with significance, but why not his death?

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We cannot change anything without accepting it.

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Free will is when you do what you have to do.

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What the soul is, we know as little as what life is. It is a big enough mystery to make us uncertain how much of the self is in the world and how much of the world is in the self.

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Parents need to know that they are the trees from which the fruit falls in the fall.

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The mother who tries to embody herself in the child without even once taking into account that the child is not just an appendage, a creature dependent on her, but a new and individual being, often endowed with a character that hardly resembles the to the character of the parents, and even looks alarmingly alien in some cases.

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Love alone is of no use if it is not accompanied by reason.

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We cannot say why, it is simply a fact that it is wise to think as the ancients used to think; not doing so may please us or our rationalism, but it takes something away from the world.

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We should not pretend to understand the world only through reason. The judgment of reason is only a part of the truth.

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Man does not become enlightened by imagining the shapes of light, but by becoming aware of darkness.

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Suffering must be overcome. This is only possible if we take it upon ourselves. We learn this from Christ carrying the cross.

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We look back on our great teachers with respect, but we feel gratitude for those who touched our souls.

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Whoever looks into the mirror of the water, first sees his own image. He who goes to himself exposes himself to meeting himself. The mirror does not flatter, it faithfully shows the face that we never show to the world. (...) But the mirror sees behind the mask.

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The only person who truly understands us is our mother.

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The mother-child relationship is certainly the deepest and most essential relationship we know; since the child is, so to speak, a part of the mother's body for a while!

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If you're against him, you're with him.

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We should not take psychological theories too seriously. Psychology is not a religious creed, but a point of view, and if we think about it in a human way, we can understand each other.

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Life's serious problems are never fully resolved. If it ever seems that this statement is not true after all, it is a sure sign that something is lost. It seems that the meaning and purpose of a problem does not lie in the solution, but in working on it continuously.

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Let us not pretend that we perceive the world solely with our intellect; our feelings can help us understand just as much.

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The idea that a person has a dark side, which consists not only of small weaknesses and beauty flaws, but actually has a demonic dynamic, is terrible.

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All kinds of projection cloud the image of our fellow human beings, distort objectivity and thereby deprive us of all possibilities for real relationships.

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Science is aware that it does not possess the truth, therefore it seeks it, the church knows that it possesses the truth, therefore it does not seek it.

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To perceive something is nothing more than to know it to the extent of our intention.

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Religion was actually meant to heal spiritual suffering. I always fell for this idea, also in the medical field.

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Our life is like the sun. In the morning, the power of the sun increases continuously, and finally, glowing and radiating heat, it reaches the setting point. This starts the process in the opposite direction. The continuous progress of the sun no longer means the continuous increase of power, but the diminution of power. Therefore, our tasks as young people are different than as old people.