Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.

All religions are therapies for the sorrows and disorders of the soul.

One cannot live without inconsistency

The heaping together of paintings by Old Masters in museums is a catastrophe; likewise, a collection of a hundred Great Brains makes one big fathead.

In the end, the only events of my life worth telling are those when the imperishable world erupted into this transitory one ‘¦ All other memories of travels, people and my surroundings have paled beside...

I could not say I believe. I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God.

The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers

Sensation tell us a thing is.Thinking tell us what it is this thing is.Feeling tells us what this thing is to us.

Psychology does not know what good and evil are in themselves; it knows them only as judgments about relationships.

The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the...

Although we human beings have our own personal life, we are yet in large measure the representatives, the victims and promoters of a collective spirit whose years are counted in centuries. We can well think...

Creative powers can just as easily turn out to be destructive. It rests solely with the moral personality whether they apply themselves to good things or to bad. And if this is lacking, no teacher...

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes...

Our heart glows, and secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. Dealing with the unconscious has become a question of life for us.

An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the...

Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own.

Error is just as important a condition of life as truth

Space flights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because it is easier to go to Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one’s own being

The only thing we have to fear on the planet is man

The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semi-human, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and in the...

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.

It had become clear to me, in a flash of illumination, that for me the only possible goal was psychiatry. Here alone the two currents of my interest could flow together and in a united...

I cannot love anyone if I hate myself. That is the reason why we feel so extremely uncomfortable in the presence of people who are noted for their special virtuousness, for they radiate an atmosphere...

He who looks outside his own heart DREAMS, he who looks inside his own heart AWAKENS.

To be normal is the ideal aim of the unsuccessful.

Enlightenment is not imagining figures of light but making the darkness conscious.

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.

The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong

Our blight is ideologies — they are the long-expected Antichrist!

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

The man who promises everything is sure to fulfil nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the...

There is rarely a creative man who does not have to pay a high price for the divine spark of his great gifts . . . the human element is frequently bled for the benefit...

Understanding does not cure evil, but it is a definite help, inasmuch as one can cope with a comprehensible darkness.

Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.

We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.

I know that in many things I am not like others, but I do not know what I really am like. Man cannot compare himself with any other creature; he is not a monkey, not...

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

Great talents are the most lovely and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off.

We live in a time when there dawns upon us a realization that the people on the other side of the mountain are not made up exclusively of redheaded devils responsible for all the evil...

What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak to the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit...

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

The word ‘happiness’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

The true leader is always led

It is indeed time for the clergyman and the psychotherapist to join forces

The life of man is a dubious experiment. It is a tremendous phenomenon only in numerical terms. Individually, it is so fleeting, so insufficient, that it is literally a miracle that anything can exist and...

I maintained that psychiatry, in the broadest sense, is a dialogue between the sick psyche and the psyche of the doctor, which is presumed to be ‘normal.’ It is a coming to terms between the...