The afternoon of a human life must have a significance of its own, and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.
It is the function of the Church to oppose all original experience, because this can only be unorthodox.
A book of mine is always a matter of fate. There is something unpredictable about the process of writing, and I cannot prescribe for myself any predetermined course.
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.
Much of the evil in the world is due to the fact that man in general is hopelessly unconscious.
One finds one’s destiny on the path one takes to avoid it.
However far-fetched it may sound, experience shows that many neuroses are caused by the fact that people blind themselves to their own religious promptings because of a childish passion for rational enlightenment.
We all must do what Christ did. We must make our experiment. We must make mistakes. We must live out our own version of life. And there will be error. If you avoid error you do not live.
Life is a luminous pause between two mysteries that are yet one.
Most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us.
Gnosticism was stamped out completely and its remnants are so badly mangled that special study is needed to get any insight at all into its inner meaning.
Securities, certitudes and peace do not lead to discoveries.
The answer to human life is not to be found within the limits of human life.
Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it.
I don’t believe there is a God. I know there is a God.
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.
My work as a psychoanalyst is to help patients recover their lost wholeness and to strengthen the psyche so it can resist future dismemberment.
No dream symbol can be separated from the individual who dreams it, and there is no definite or straightforward interpretation of any dream.
What we lack is intensity of life.
When you come to think about it, nothing has any meaning, for when there was nobody to think, there was nobody to interpret what happened.