top of page
Quotes by Psychologist

"Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious."


"Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built."

"Time flows smoother when you are with people you love."

"That kind of forgiveness is of God. And if they have it, they have it, and if they don't, well, maybe they'll find it someday."

"Well, at least this is what I told myself every day as I fell asleep with the fire still burning and the moon shining high up in the sky and my head spinning comforting from two bottles of wine, and I smiled with tears in my eyes because it was beautiful and so god damn sad and I did not know how to be one of those without the other."


"These poets and other creative persons are the ones who express being itself, he held. As I would put it, these are the ones who enlarge human consciousness. Their creativity is the most basic manifestation of a man or woman fulfilling his or her own being in the world."

"The supreme principle of socialism is that man takes precedence over things, life over property, and hence, work over capital; that power follows creation, and not possession; that man must not be governed by circumstances, but circumstances must be governed by man."

"The paradoxical situation with a vast number of people today is that they are half asleep when awake, and half awake when asleep, or when they want to sleep."

"Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one 'object' of love. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism."

"It was quite a beautiful thing, the way we simply just came to be, with no effort or trying and slowly we found each other's hands in the dark. No chains or promises, just a simple sign of hope that things will go on and get better and that things and people and views are still out there, yet to be found."

"I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once and cannot add up the sum."


"Now, I believe in life, and I believe in the joy of human existence, but these things cannot be experienced except as we also face the despair, also face the anxiety that every human being has to face if he lives with any creativity at all."


"With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair; by words the teacher transfers his knowledge to the pupil; by words the speaker sweeps his audience with him and determines its judgments and decisions. Words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings."

"Creative power is mightier than its possessor."

"Synchronicity could be understood as an ordering system by means of which "similar things coincide, without there being any apparent cause."

"My favorite place in the world is next to you."

"But the shadow is merely somewhat inferior, primitive, unadapted, and awkward; not wholly bad. It even contains childish or primitive qualities which would in a way vitalize and embellish human existence, but convention forbids!"


"Observe the difference between your attitude to illusions and mine. You have to defend the religious illusion with all your might. If it becomes discredited - and indeed the threat to it is great enough - then your world collapses. There is nothing left for you but to despair of everything, of civilization and the future of mankind. From that bondage I am, we are, free. Since we are prepared to renounce a good part of our infantile wishes, we can bear it if a few of our expectations turn out to be illusions."

"God Himself even "forgets" the wickedness committed by those whom He has forgiven. That's why it is never too late to clean up your life."

"Beautiful, enticing, forbidden fruit will be offered to you when your "hunger" is greatest. If you are foolish enough to reach for it, your fingers will sink into the rotten mush on the back side. That's the way sin operates in our lives. It promises everything. It delivers nothing but disgust and heartache."


"A woman should soften but not weaken a man."

"An individual may be alone in a physical sense for many years and yet he may be related to ideas, values, or at least social patterns that give him a feeling of communion and "belonging." On the other hand, he may live among people and yet be overcome with an utter feeling of isolation, the outcome of which, if it transcends a certain limit, is the state of insanity which schizophrenic disturbances present."

"Let me leave you with this thought, written by my father before he died. If you incorporate it into your system of values, it will serve as a worthy guide to the management of your sexual energy: Strong desire is like a river. As long as it flows within the banks of God's will-be the current strong or weak-all is well. But when it overruns those boundaries and seeks its own channels, then disaster lurks in the rampage below."

"I was a flower that bloomed and sparked way too fast. He took me in 'cause I was pretty in all kinds of colors but way too soon I stood on his table sad and dried up. I forgot to nourish myself and the sun never shone from my sky."

"6 months, 2 weeks, 4 days,and I still don't know which month it was thenor what day it is now.Blurred out linesfrom hangovers to coffeeanother vagabond lost to love."


"Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death."


"We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our body, which is doomed to decay..., from the external world which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless force of destruction, and finally from our relations with other men... This last source is perhaps more painful to use than any other."


"Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends."

"The psychopathology of the masses is rooted in the psychology of the individual."


"So many tangles in life are ultimately hopeless that we have no appropriate sword other than laughter."


"Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us. Like a chemical mixture, if one of us is changed, both of us will be. Will we grow in self - actualization, or will it destroy us? The one thing we can be certain of is that if we let ourselves fully into the relationship for good or evil, we will not come out unaffected."

"He left that morning, the last words still echoing in my head, and though he said he'd come back one day I know a broken promise from a right one for I have used them myself and there is no coming back. Minds like ours are can't be tamed and the price for freedom is the price we pay."

"The creative mind plays with the object it loves."

"Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved." Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved because I love." Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you."

"I took him to the river and said "let's watch something drown, So he took a stoneand I took my necklaceand we threw it all together,the way I always think I will get better in July. Things will change and sounds won't acheand I gave my heart to uncertainty so many times, and so I took him to the river,threw the necklace in the river to slowly watch it drown, or burn, or fade awaylike I've done so many times."


"We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself."

"Let me wake up next to you, have coffee in the morning and wander through the city with your hand in mine, and I'll be happy for the rest of my fucked up little life."

"I haven't been very impressed lately.By people,or places,or the way someone said he loved me and then slowly changed his mind."


"Anxiety, with its concomitant feelings of helplessness, isolation, and conflict, is an exceedingly painful experience. One tends to be angry and resentful toward those responsible for placing him in such a situation of pain. Clinical experience yields many examples like the following: A dependent person, finding himself in a situation of responsibility with which he feels he cannot cope, reacts with hostility both toward those who have placed him in the situation and toward those (usually parents) who caused him to be unable to cope with it. Or he feels hostility toward his therapist, whom he believes should bail him out"


"Sisyphus, ' is an interpretation of the unavoidable limits to which everyone who is human is condemned. The constructive way of dealing with anxiety in this sense consists of learning to live with it, accepting it as a 'teacher, ' to borrow Kirkegaard's phrase, to school us in confronting our human destiny."


"Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion."


"That which he projects ahead of him as his ideal, is merely his substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood - the time when he was his own ideal."

"Great growth comes from loneliness. You have time to develop, dwell in your own mind and go a bit mad. All great people are a bit mad. That's good to remember. Don't escape it. Great growth comes from time spent in foreign lands, watching foreign people with foreign cultures. It makes you forget about your own land and race and town for a while. Great growth also comes from rooting yourself into one place from time to time. Unpack your bags, get a nice bed, a book shelf, some friends. Learn to show up, keep in touch, stick around. Growth comes in all sort of forms and shapes, everywhere at all times, and it's yours to take and consume. Do what ought to be done. Here and now, to get you somewhere - anywhere."

"You might say "no, you will never do that, that's not you, not who I know, not who I thought you were, and I will say "watch me"."

"It is under all circumstances an advantage to be in full possession of one's personality, otherwise the repressed elements will only crop up as a hindrance elsewhere, not just at some unimportant point, but at the very spot where we are most sensitive. If people can be educated to see the shadow-side of their nature clearly, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more self-knowledge can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures."

"There are people, of course, who think it unscientific to take anything seriously; they do not want their intellectual playground disturbed by graver considerations. But the doctor who fails to take account of man's feelings for values commits a serious blunder, and if he tries to correct the mysterious and well-nigh inscrutable workings of nature with his so-called scientific attitude, he is merely putting his shallow sophistry in place of nature's healing processes."

"It's called being an artist for a reason, it's something YOU ARE. It's how you live. It's WHO you are. How you spend your life and what you leave behind."
bottom of page