Student Years

I realized that one gets nowhere unless one talks to people about the things they know. The naive person does not appreciate what an insult it is to talk to one’s fellows about anything that is unknown to them. They pardon such ruthless behavior only in a writer, journalist, or poet. I came to see that a new idea, or even just an unusual aspect of an old one, can be communicated only by facts. Facts remain and cannot be brushed aside; sooner or later someone will come upon them and know what he has found.

Sigmund Freud

The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. The numinosum is dangerous because it lures men to extremes, so that a modest truth is regarded as the truth and a minor mistake is equated with fatal error. Tout passe–yesterday’s truth is today’s deception, and yesterday’s false inference may be tomorrow’s revelation. This is particularly so in psychological matters, of which, if truth were told, we still know very little. We are still a long way fro understanding what it signifies that nothing has any existence unless some small-and oh, so transitory–consciousness has become aware of it.

One form of life cannot simply be abandoned unless it is exchanged for another.

Confrontations with the Unconscious

The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life.