We need to work on the world so it will not be so oppressive.
I don’t think anything changes until ideas change. The usual American viewpoint is to believe that something is wrong with the person.
I see happiness as a by-product. I don’t think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made.
Well, if I’m only a result of past causes, then I’m a victim of those past causes. There is no deeper meaning behind things that gives me a reason to be here.
The circumstances, including my body and my parents, whom I may curse, are my soul’s own choice and I do not understand this because I have forgotten.
We are driven by the results of the Big Bang, billions of years ago, which eventually produced life, which eventually produced human beings, and so on. But me? I’m an accident – a result – and therefore a victim.
I’m the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I’m a victim again. A result.
Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us...
In the history of the treatment of depression, there was the dunking stool, purging of the bowels of black bile, hoses, attempts to shock the patient. All of these represent hatred or aggression towards what depression represents in the patient.
In the cosmology that’s behind psychology, there is no reason for anyone to be here or do anything.
When they talk about family values, it’s in a repressive way, as if our American tradition were only the Puritan tradition or the 19th century oppressive tradition. The Christian tradition.
If you are still being hurt by an event that happened to you at twelve, it is the thought that is hurting you now.
By setting up a universe which tends to hold everything we do, see, and say in the sway of its cosmos, an archetype is best comparable with a God.
Instead of seeing depression as a dysfunction, it is a functioning phenomenon. It stops you cold, sets you down, makes you damn miserable.
The comic spirit masquerades in all things we say and do. We are each a clown and do not need to put on a white face.
We’re an air bag society that wants guarantees on everything that we buy. We want to be able to take everything back and get another one. We want a 401-k plan and Social Security.
The word power has such a generally negative implication in our society. What are people talking about? Are they talking about muscles, or control?
Whether we like it or not, men have more of the offices, more of the higher jobs, more of the seats in Congress. Men need to re-examine what their power is. We need to understand how to use it.
I’ve found that contemporary psychology enrages me with its simplistic ideas of human life, and also its emptiness.
As Plotinus tells us, we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belongs to its necessity.