• "The human psyche wants two things: it wants a fuller expression of its own possibilities, and it wants self-healing."
  • "The spirit of evil is negation of the life force by fear. Only boldness can deliver us from fear. And if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is violated."
  • “The greatest burden a child must bear is the un-lived life of the parents.”
  • "Time spent undistracted and alone, in self-examination, journaling, meditation, resolves the unresolved and takes us from mentally fat to fit."
  • "What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you. You are always a slave to what you’re not aware of."
  • “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
  • "Resentment tells you one of two things. One, is that someone’s treading on your territory and something needs to be done about it. Or that you need to grow the hell up and stop complaining."
  • "The motives for avoidance rise from our existential proclivities to fear and lethargy, and both nemeses win more battles than they lose. All the while, the soul is roiling beneath, sending up protests, distress calls, SOS messages, bills of indictment, and so on."
  • "A complex is history on parade."
  • "In a letter in the 1950s, Jung observed that the work of being an evolved human being consists of three parts. Psychology can bring us insight, but then, he insisted, come the moral qualities of the individual: courage and endurance."
  • "Insight, courage, and endurance — not a bad litany of which to be mindful every day."
  • "Wherever there is a hysterical certainty, and there is much in our land, it is because doubt has already planted its black flag inside the soul and the ego is running away like a child."
  • "To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
  • "The things that we understand, create silence. The things that we do not, create emotion."
  • “If you would persuade, appeal to interest and not to reason.”
  • "We all walk and choose too small for us."
  • "We are all recovering children."
  • "Understand that when you change, everything changes."
  • "(F)or the great majority of the gifted, accomplished persons I have known, permission is not something given but something to be seized."
  • "Many in the context of therapy discover that what has depressed them, what they sought to distract, or anesthetize, or flee, is actually the larger life that wishes expression through them. The moment we realize that our life is really in our own hands, that it is a spiritual summons to be honored, and that we deprive others by not bringing our more developed selves to share, then we realize permission is not something given — but something to be seized."
  • "I would define the shadow as those parts of us, or of our groups and organizations, that, when brought to consciousness, are troubling to our concept of ourselves, contradictory to our professed values, or intimidating in what they might ask of our timid souls."
  • "To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse.”
  • "But as I started working with them, really paying attention to this, I realized: What do I bring to them? What is the message that I’m supposed to be giving to these people? That they’re lost? They’re not going to feel lost. I mean, my evangelism teacher in bible school said, 'You’ve got to get them lost before you can get them saved.'"
  • "This is a truism: if you can’t understand why someone is doing something, look at the consequences of their actions, whatever they might be, and then infer the motivations from their consequences...Looking from the outside, if you only see the negatives of it, you blind yourself to why it continues. How it still serves me. And if you don’t know how something serves you, you can’t really understand why you keep doing it. It’ll seem like a mystery to you."
  • "The question is not why the addiction, but why the pain."
  • "The quality of your mind is the quality of your life."
  • "For those habituated to high levels of internal stress since early childhood, it is the absence of stress that creates unease, evoking boredom and a sense of meaninglessness."
  • "Intuition is intelligence by means of the unconscious."
  • "Thou knowest this man's fall, but thou knowest not his wrassling."
  • "If it's hysterical, it's historical."
  • "What does it mean to recover something? It means to find it. When you recover something, you get it back. In other words, what we get back is ourselves. That self is never actually lost."
  • “Your conflicts, all the difficult things, the problematic situations in your life are not chance or haphazard. They are actually yours. They are specifically yours, designed specifically for you by a part of you that loves you more than anything else. The part of you that loves you more than anything else has created roadblocks to lead you to yourself. You are not going in the right direction unless there is something pricking you in the side, telling you, 'Look here! This way!' That part of you loves you so much that it doesn’t want you to lose the chance. It will go to extreme measures to wake you up, it will make you suffer greatly if you don’t listen. What else can it do? That is its purpose.”
  • "Projection is the process of misinterpreting what is 'inside' as coming from 'outside'."
  • "Don't retreat into a story."
  • "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."
  • “The ordinary human experience is to be way overconfident in your own ideas, particularly if you’ve worked hard for them and express them to other people. The world is full of insanely overconfident people and of course they make lots of mistakes.”
  • “When you are up against a wall, put down roots like a tree, until clarity comes from deeper sources to see over that wall and grow.”
  • "We suffer more often in imagination than in reality."
  • "I've had a lot of worries in my life. Most of which never happened."
  • "Neurosis is suffering that has not yet found its meaning."
  • "Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering."
  • "You grow by doing what excites you and what scares you."
  • "A neurotic is a man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it."
  • "Mood follows action."
  • "If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present."
  • "We’ve made depression an illness. It may be the body’s way of saying, ‘You better deal with something, because it’s making you really sad.'"
  • "Neediness occurs when you place a higher priority on what others think of you than what you think of yourself."
  • "You need to ask the question: what task is this person's neurosis helping him or her avoid?"
  • "The feeling of authenticity comes from whether we are acting in line with the reputation we want."
  • "Where things can go awry is when we never consider what enough is as a marker. When this happens, we don’t solve for enough or optimize for it, we just keep going and going with more and more."
  • "A lot of denial masquerades as patience."
  • "The quicker you want something, the easier you are to manipulate."
  • "Humans can only feel real hatred of people they’re able to dehumanize in their heads."
  • "Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious."
  • “Where there is anger, there is not yet understanding.”
  • "Who looks outside; dreams. Who looks inside, awakes."
  • "Power corrupts; powerlessness corrupts more."
  • “If you want to find someone’s true age, listen to them. If they talk about the past and they talk about all the things that happened that they did, they’ve gotten old. If they think about their dreams, their aspirations, what they’re still looking forward to—they’re young.”
  • "When you give away 10% of your income, you lose 10% of your purchasing power, which is minor compared to the 110% increase in happiness you will gain."
  • "When someone is nasty, hateful, or mean toward you, assume they have a disease. That makes it easier to have empathy toward them, which can soften the conflict."
  • "The mind is there to solve problems, not to create them."
  • “The ego says, ‘When everything falls into place, I will feel peace.’ The spirit says, “Find peace and everything will fall into place.’”