1. “Absolutism is not a ruthless ruler, but a ruthless rule -- and this we don't easily remember, for our minds fix upon the figures of czars and crime lords. These images serve to keep the danger of tyranny projected onto Stalin, Genghis Khan and Al Capone, protecting us from the absolutism that can rule the psyche in the guise of fundamentalism in religion, bottom-lineism in business and progress in the sciences.”
2. ”As civilization subsides into its own waste deposits, it doesn't matter whether you are feminine or masculine or any composite of them. We all dissolve together.”
3. ”As long as you're going to create a castle, the psyche can only come in as an invader.”
4. ”As truths are the fictions of the rational, so fictions are the truths of the imaginal.”
5. ”A terrorist is the product of our education that says that fantasy is not real, that says aesthetics is just for artists, that says soul is only for priests, imagination is trivial or dangerous and for crazies, and that reality, what we must adapt to, is the external world, a world that is dead. A terrorist is a result of this whole long process of wiping out the psyche.”
6. “Besides policing weapons, we might search for methods of teaching that capture attention and evoke concentration -- images, dramas, rituals, rhythms--thereby transferring power back from the weapon to the child's mind.”
7. ”By accepting the idea that I am the effect of a subtle buffeting between hereditary and societal forces, I reduce myself to a result. The more my life is accounted for by what already occurred in my chromosomes, by what my parents did or didn't do, and by my early years now long past, the more my biography is the story of a victim.”
8. ”Do you really believe that humans invented the wheel out of their big brains alone, or fire, or baskets, or tools? Stones rolled downhill; bolts of fire shot from the sky and out of the earth; birds wove and probed and pounded, as did apes and elephants. The sciences that master nature were taught by nature how it could be mastered.”
9. ”Each person enters the world called.”
10. ”Expectations that are only statistical are no longer human.”
11. ”If we could recover the imaginal we must first recover its organ, the heart, and its kind of philosophy.”
12. ”I find today that patients are more sensitive than the worlds they live in.”
13. ”In any system, whether a corporation, a family or the inner arrangements of the human psyche, a vigorous "no" to the good of the whole may serve the good of the whole and increase its power even more than a complaint "yes."”
14. ”In my bones, I am afraid of Christian unconsciousness, because, unlike Buddhism, say, or even Judaism, Christianism lives myths deliberately, insisting they are not myths, and this has dreadful paranoid consequences.”
15. “Inefficiency becomes a favorite mode of rebellion against the tyranny of efficiency: slowdown, work-to-rule, buck-passing, absenteeism, delayed responses, mislaid documents, unreturned phone calls.”
16. ”Is there a reality that is not framed or formed? No. Reality is always coming through a pair of glasses, a point of view, a language--a fantasy.”
17. ”Knowledge makes us able to leave it behind, able to take off down the road of pitfalls in full foolishness, risking even greater windmills still further out, an old knight more and more bold, an old rogue more and more peculiar, ageing into the freedom of our pathology.”
18. ”Let us imagine the anima mundi [world soul] neither above the world encircling it as a divine and remote emanation of spirit, a world of powers, archetypes, and principles transcendent to things, nor within the material world as its unifying panpsychic life-principle. Rather let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul-spark, that seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form.”
19. “My fantasies are like wounds; they reveal my pathology.”
20. ”Neglect of beauty neglects the Goddess, who then has to steal back into the departments as sexual harassment, into the laboratories as "research" experiments with sex and gender, and into the consulting rooms as seductive assignations.”
21. ”Purists are deadly, and so they know all about deadly sins.”
22. “Something always has you in mind.”
23. ”The desert is not in Egypt; it is anywhere once we desert the heart.”
24. ”The ideal of growth makes us feel stunted; the ideal family makes us feel crazy.”
25. ”The lead horse does not run because it is whipped.”
26. ”The cooking vessel of the soul takes in everything, everything can become soul; and by taking into its imagination any and all events, psychic space grows.”
27. ”The healer is the illness and the illness is the healer.”
28. ”The heart in the beast is not your heart only: it is a microcosmic sun, a cosmos of all possible experiences that no one can own.”
29. ”The psyche is highly flammable material. So we are always wrapping things in asbestos, keeping our images and fantasies at arm's length because they are so full of love.”
30. ”There is a secret love hiding in each problem.”
31. ”The sexual fascination is the soul trying to get out and get into something other than itself.”
32. ”The transfiguration of matter occurs through wonder.”
33. ”The soul can become a reality again only when each of us has the courage to take it as the first reality in our own lives, to stand for it and not just "believe" in it.”
34. ”The whole world is sick….and you can't put this right by having a good therapeutic dialogue or finding deeper meanings. It's not about meaning anymore; it's about survival.”
35. ”Today we need heroes of descent, not masters of denial, mentors of maturity who can carry sadness, who give love to aging, who show soul without irony or embarrassment.”
36. “To mythic consciousness, the persons of the imagination are real.
37. “We may be actually closer and more truly communicating in letters than when talking. The vertical connection downwards and inwards, each on his solitary own, may be making a connection of souls through imagination, a connection that does not necessarily happen in live conversation or on the telephone.”
38. “When the dominant vision that holds a period of culture together cracks, consciousness regresses into earlier containers, seeking sources for survival which also offer sources of revival.”
39. “When we are told what is healthy we are being told what is right to think and feel. When we are told what is mentally ill we are being told what ideas, behavior, and fantasies are wrong.”
