Creative powers can just as easily turn out to be destructive. It rests solely with the moral personality whether they apply themselves to good things or to bad. And if this is lacking, no teacher can supply it or take its place.

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

Special knowledge is a terrible disadvantage.

I came to Freud for facts. I read 'The Interpretation of Dreams' and I thought- 'Oh, here is a man who is not just theorizing away, here is a man who has got facts.

Understanding does not cure evil, but it is a definite help, inasmuch as one can cope with a comprehensible darkness.

VOCATUS ATQUE NON VOCATUS DEUS ADERIT.

Man positively needs general ideas and convictions that will give a meaning to his life and enable him to find a place for himself in the universe.