One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is.

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness - all of them due to the offenders' ignorance of what is good or evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother (not in the physical sense, but as a fellow creature similarly endowed with reason and a share of the divin ...

Our anger and annoyance are more detrimental to us than the things themselves which anger or annoy us

You must endure the temptation of fear and doubt, and at the same time acknowledge to the bone that your fear is justified and your doubt is reasonable. How otherwise could it be a true temptation and a true overcoming?

There is only one way and that is your way; there is only one salvation and that is your salvation. Why are you looking around for help? Do you believe that help will come from outside? What is to come will be created in you and from you. Hence look into yourself. Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfill the way that is in you.

If we were designed by engineers, as we consumed more, we would desire less. But our frequent human tragedy is that the more we consume, the hungrier we get. What was an unexpected pleasure yesterday is what we feel entitled to today, and what won't be enough tomorrow.

The individual is increasingly deprived of the moral decision as to how he should live his own life, and instead is ruled, fed, clothed and educated as a social unit, accommodated in the appropriate housing unit, and amused in accordance with the standards that give pleasure and satisfaction to the masses. The rulers, in their turn, are just as much social units as the ruled and are distinguished only by the fact that they are specialized mouthpieces of the State doctrine. They do not need to ...

The 'death' of the Hero in the life of a boy (or a man) really means that he has finally encountered his limitations. He has met the enemy, and the enemy is himself. He has met his own dark side, his very 𝙪𝙣heroic side. He has fought the dragon and been burned by it; he has fought the revolution and drunk the dregs of his own inhumanity. He has overcome the Mother and then realized his incapacity to love the Princess. The 'death' of the Hero signals a boy's or man's enc ...

The drying up of imagination and of creative ability, which the child naturally possesses in high degree, is one of the typical symptoms of impoverishment that growing up entails. A steady loss of the vitality of feeling and of spontaneous reactions in the interests of sensibleness and good behaviour is the operative factor in the conduct now demanded of the child in relation to the collective. Increase in efficiency at the cost of depth and intensity is the hallmark of this proc ...

The development of the persona is the outcome of a process of adaptation that suppresses all individually significant features and potentialities, disguising and repressing them in favour of collective factors, or those deemed desirable by the collective. Here again, wholeness is exchanged for a workable and successful sham personality. The inner voice is stifled by the growth of a superego, of conscience, the representative of collective values. The voice, the individual experience of ...

Paradoxical as it may seem, it is, for very many persons, much easier to behave selflessly in time of crisis than it is when life is taking its normal course in undisturbed tranquility. When the going is easy, there is nothing to make us forget our precious selfness, nothing to distract our minds from the distractions with which we have chosen to be identified; we are at perfect liberty to wallow in our personality to our heart's content. And how we wallow! It is for this reason that all t ...

The distinguishing marks of the highest form of love are disinterestedness, tranquility and humility. Where there is disinterestedness there is neither greed for personal advantage nor fear for personal loss or punishment; where there is tranquility, there is neither craving nor aversion, but a steady will to conform to the divine Tao or Logos on every level of existence and a steady awareness of the divine Suchness and what should be one's own relations to it; and where there is humility ...

Right belief is the first branch of the Buddhists' Eightfold Path leading to deliverance; the root and primal cause of bondage is wrong belief, or ignorance - an ignorance, let us remember, which is never completely invincible, but always, in the last analysis, a matter of will. If we don't know, it is because we find it more convenient not to know. Original ignorance is the same thing as original sin.

So whole-hearted is the modern faith in technological idols that (despite all the lessons of mechanized warfare) it is impossible to discover in the popular thinking of our time any trace of the ancient and profoundly realistic doctrine of 𝘩𝘶𝘣𝘳𝘪𝘴 and inevitable 𝘯𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘴. There is a very general belief that, where gadgets are concerned, we can get something for nothing - can enjoy all the advantages of an elaborate, top-heavy and constantly advancing technology without having to pay for them by ...

This is, or should be, the guiding principle of all social reform - to organize the economic, political and social relationships between human beings in such a way that there shall be, for any given individual or group within the society, a minimum of temptations to covetousness, pride, cruelty and lust for power. Men and women being what they are, it is only by reducing the number and intensity of temptations that human societies can be, in some measure at least, delivered from evil.

Some of those who use spiritual exercises make progress in the life of the spirit; others, using the same exercises, make no progress. To believe that their use either constitutes enlightenment, or guarantees it, is mere idolatry and superstition. To neglect them altogether, to refuse to find out weather and in what way they can help in the achievement of our final end, is nothing but self-opinionatedness and stubborn obscurantism.

Because your own strength is unequal to the task, do not assume that it is beyond the powers of man; but if anything is within the powers and province of man, believe that it is within your own compass also.

The datum which is called 'God' and is formulated as 'the highest good' signifies, as the term itself shows, the supreme psychic value. In other words it is a concept upon which is conferred, or is actually endowed with, the highest and most general significance in determining our thoughts and actions. In the language of analytical psychology, the God-concept coincides with the particular ideational complex which, in accordance with the foregoing definition, concentrates in its ...

For everyone whose guiding principle is adaptation to external reality, imagination is something reprehensible and useless. And yet we know that every good idea and all creative work are the offspring of the imagination, and have their source in what one is pleased to call infantile fantasy. Not the artist alone, but every creative individual whatsoever owes all that is greatest in his life to fantasy. The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it ...

From the psychological point of view demons are nothing other than intruders from the unconscious, spontaneous irruptions of unconscious complexes into the continuity of the conscious process. Complexes are comparable to demons which fitfully harass our thoughts and actions; hence in antiquity and the Middle Ages acute neurotic disturbances were conceived as possession. Thus, when the individual consistently takes his stand on one side, the unconscious ranges itself on the other and rebels. He ...

Earth-bound desire, sensuality in all its forms, attachment to the lures of this world, and the incessant dissipation of psychic energy in the world's prodigal variety, are the main obstacle to the development of a coherent and purposive attitude.

A symbol loses its magical or, if you prefer, its redeeming power as soon as its liability to dissolve is recognized. To be effective, a symbol must be by its very nature unassailable. It must be the best possible expression of the prevailing world-view, an unsurpassed container of meaning; it must also be sufficiently remote from comprehension to resist all attempts of the critical intellect to break it down; and finally, its aesthetic form must appeal so convincingly to our feelings that no ...

The detachment of libido from the object transfers it into the subject, where it activates the images lying dormant in the unconscious. These images are archaic forms of expression which become symbols, and these appear in their turn as equivalents of the devalued objects. This process is as old as mankind, for symbols may be found among the relics of prehistoric man as well as among the most primitive human types living today. Symbol-formation, therefore, must obviously be an extremely import ...

Where love is, power cannot prevail, and where power prevails, love cannot reign.

The feeling of bliss accompanies all those moments when one feels borne along by the current of life, when what was dammed up can flow off without restraint, when there is no need to do this thing or that thing with a conscious effort in order to find a way out or to achieve a result. We have all known situations or moods when things go of themselves, when we no longer need to manufacture all sorts of wearisome conditions for our joy or pleasure. The time of childhood is the unforgettab ...

A man's hatred is always concentrated on the thing that makes him conscious of his bad qualities.

Any person capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him.

A man's unconscious makes a far stronger impression on an observer than his consciousness does, and his actions are of considerably higher importance than his rational intentions.

One of the greatest errors of our civilization is the superstitious belief in verbal statements, the boundless overestimation of instruction by means of words and methods. A child certainly allows himself to be impressed by the grand talk of his parents, but do they really imagine he is educated by it? Actually, it is the parents' lives that educate the child - what they add by word and gesture at best serves only to confuse him. The same holds good for the teacher. But we have such a beli ...

Identity is primarily an unconscious conformity with objects. It is not an 𝘦𝘲𝘶𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, but an 𝘢 𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘰𝘳𝘪 likeness which was never the object of consciousness. Identity is responsible for the naive assumption that the psychology of one man is like that of another, that the same motives occur everywhere, that what is agreeable to me must obviously be pleasurable for others, that what I find immoral must also be immoral for them, and so on. It is also responsible for the almost universal desire to co ...

Many people from the educated classes have to move in two totally different milieus - the domestic circle and the world of affairs. These two totally different environments demand two totally different attitudes, which, depending on the degree of the ego's 𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 with the attitude of the moment, produce a duplication of character. In accordance with social conditions and requirements, the social character is oriented on the one hand by the expectations and demands of society, and ...

We are always inclined to justify ourselves before anyone who holds us responsible for an emotional action by saying that we acted only on an outburst of affect and are not usually in that condition. When it concerns ourselves we are glad to explain the affect as an exceptional condition of diminished responsibility but are reluctant to make the same allowance for others. Even if this is a not very edifying attempt to absolve our beloved ego, there is still something positive in the feeling of ...

The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What is less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it in ourselves ...

There are persons whose existence is little more than a series of zigzags, as now one tendency and now another gets the upper hand. Their spirit wars with their flesh, they wish for incompatibilities, wayward impulses interrupt their most deliberate plans, and their lives are one long drama of repentance and of effort to repair misdemeanours and mistakes.

If it is possible to get rid of anger and worry, why is it necessary to have them at all?

If there were no one prompt to help a brother first, and find out afterwards weather he were worthy; no one willing to drown his private wrongs in pity for the wronger's person; no one ready to be duped many a time rather than live always on suspicion; no one glad to treat individuals passionately and impulsively rather than by general rules of prudence; the world would be an infinitely worse place than it is now to live in.

The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance. Indeed, self-knowledge as a psychotherapeutic measure frequently requires much painstaking work extending o ...

Most people are content to be self-righteous and prefer mutual vilification (if nothing worse!) to the recognition of their projections.

The more civilized, the more unconscious and complicated a man is, the less he is able to follow his instincts. His complicated living conditions and the influence of his environment are so strong that they drown the quiet voice of nature. Opinions, beliefs, theories, and collective tendencies appear in its stead and back up all the aberrations of the conscious mind. Deliberate attention should then be given to the unconscious so that the compensation can set to work.

In the course of the eighteenth century, there arose a notorious rift between faith and knowledge. Faith lacked experience and science missed out the soul. Instead, science believed fervently in absolute objectivity and assiduously overlooked the fundamental difficulty that the real vehicle and begetter of all knowledge is the 𝒑𝒔𝒚𝒄𝒉𝒆, the very thing that scientists knew the least about for the longest time. It was regarded as a symptom of chemical reactions, an epiphenomenon of biological proc ...

To know where the other person makes a mistake is of little value. It only becomes interesting when you know where you make the mistake, for then you can do something about it.

Mistakes are the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is 𝒏𝒐𝒕.

People depend on constant communication with others to keep their minds organized. We all need to think to keep things straight, but we mostly think by talking. We need to talk about the past, so we can distinguish the trivial, overblown concerns that otherwise plague our thoughts from experiences that are truly important. We need to talk about the nature of the present and our plans for the future, so we know where we are, where we are going, and why we are going there. We must submit the str ...

Our knowledge of how to act in the world remains eternally incomplete - partly because of our profound ignorance of the vast unknown, partly because of our wilful blindness, and partly because the world continues, in its entropic manner, to transform itself unexpectedly.

It is better to presume ignorance and invite learning than to assume sufficient knowledge and risk the consequent blindness. When you are tightly boxed in or cornered - all too often by your own stubborn and fixed adherence to some unconsciously worshiped assumptions - all there is to help you is what you have not yet learned. It is necessary and helpful to be, and in some ways to remain, a beginner. No one unwilling to be a foolish beginner can learn. It is necessary even for the most accompl ...

Aim at something. Pick the best target you can currently conceptualize. Stumble towards it. Notice your errors and misconceptions along the way, face them, and correct them. Get your story straight. Past, present, future - they all matter. You need to map your path. You need to know where you were, so that you do not repeat the mistakes of the past. You need to know where you are, or you will not be able to draw a line from your starting point to your destination. You need to know where you ar ...

A naive person trusts because he or she believes that people are essentially or even universally trustworthy. But any person who has truly lived has been, or has, betrayed. Someone with experience knows that people are capable of deception and willing to deceive. That knowledge brings with it an arguably justified pessimism about human nature, personal and otherwise, but it also opens the door to another kind of faith in humanity: one based on courage, rather than naivete. I will trust you, I ...

You will be saved and delivered from the evil you endure and receive the true well-being you so clumsily strive after, not through personal desire, nor envy, nor through adherence to a party programme; nor through hatred, indignation or the pursuit of fame, nor even through a sense of justice, and above all not through troubling yourselves about the organization of other people's lives. However strange it may seem, it is only through an activity within your own soul, involving no external ...

If some people, despite recognizing the virtue of love, can admit the necessity of tormenting or murdering certain people for the sake of some future good, then others, by just the same right and also acknowledging the virtue of love, can claim the same necessity in the name of some future good. Thus it might appear obvious that the admission of any kind of exception to the requirements of fulfilling the law of love diminishes the whole significance, meaning and virtue of this law which lies a ...

The law of human life is such that the improvement of it, whether for the individual or for society, is only possible through inner, moral perfection. All the efforts people make to improve their lives through violent external behaviour towards one another serve as the most potent form of propaganda and example of evil, and do not improve life, but, on the contrary, increase the evil which gathers size like a snowball and increasingly alienates people from the only possible way of genuinely im ...

A free man is only master of what he can master without impediment. The only thing we are free to master without impediment is ourselves. Therefore, if you see a person wishing to control not himself but others, you know that he is not free: he has become a slave of his desire to dominate people.

This comes up all the time in mechanical work. A hang-up. You just sit there and stare and think, and search randomly for new information, and go away and come back again, and after a while the unseen factors start to emerge.

If you have high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened. Your ego isolates you from reality. When the facts show that you've just goofed, you're not as likely to admit it. When false information makes you look good, you're likely to believe it.

The idea that one person's mind is accessible to another's is just a conversational illusion, just a figure of speech, an assumption that makes some kind of exchange between basically alien creatures seem plausible, and that really the relationship of one person to another is ultimately unknowable. The effort of fathoming what is in another's mind creates a distortion of what is seen.

When you ask a question
And there is no response,
Then that is the answer

The more you know,
The more you think you don't.
The more you don't know,
The more you think you do.

We must ask whether it was worthwhile if we make each other feel unhappy or hurt in the name of defending our beliefs. Instead of maintaining the sanctity of our values, shouldn't we care more about the person sitting in front of us? Isn't it better to be happy together than to be right alone? Trying to convince someone to adopt our views is largely the work of our ego. Even if we turn out to be right, our ego knows no satisfaction and seeks a new argument to engage in. Maturity comes ...

Instead of being the smartest person in the room, quick to critique others,
be the warmhearted fiend, bringing people together and sharing things.
Be the sensitive neighbor, capable of feeling the suffering of others.

If I want to convince someone,
I first listen attentively and try to understand them.
Even if I am right, they won't be convinced until they
feel heard and respected.

Many conflicts in our lives can be resolved
if we put ourselves in the other person's shoes.
Try to look at things from their point of view.
If you consider only your side,
you are no different from a child.

Do you have a lot of enemies?
Then be humble and stop speaking ill of people.
Those who do not make enemies are more powerful
than those who have the strength to fight them all and win.

When you keep clashing with someone,
it may be the world's way of asking you to look closely at yourself.
When you don't like someone, try to figure out what it is you don't like;
see whether you have a similar flaw within yourself.

When you concentrate, even a phone book can be interesting.
If you are bored, maybe you are not concentrating.

This is metaphorical language, but you can say that some people are living on the level of the sex organs, and that's all they're living for. That's the meaning of life. This is Freud's philosophy, is it not? Then you come to the Adlerian philosophy of the will to power, that all of life is centered on obstructions and overcoming the obstructions. Well, sure, that's a perfectly good life, and those are forms of divinity also. But they are on the animal level. Then there com ...

Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the shortcomings of our life, and Marx tells us to blame the upper class of our society. But the only one to blame is oneself. That's the helpful idea about the Indian idea of karma. Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself.

The stages of human development are the same today as they were in the ancient times. As a child, you are brought up in a world of discipline, of obedience, and you are dependent on others. All this has to be transcended when you come to maturity, so that you can live not in dependency but with self-responsible authority. If you can't cross that threshold, you have the basis for neuroses.