I've realized that somebody who's tired and needs a rest, and goes on working all the same is a fool.

The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological order, but psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions which are nothing other than psychic epidemics. At any moment several million human beings may be smitten with a new madness, and then we shall have another world war or devastating revolution. Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche.

Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next.

The need for mythic statements is satisfied when we frame a view of the world which adequately explains the meaning of human existence in the cosmos, a view which springs from our psychic wholeness, from the co-operation between conscious and unconscious. Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable - perhaps everything.

About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives.

Special knowledge is a terrible disadvantage.

The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.