There is, how­ever, a strong empir­i­cal rea­son why we should cul­ti­vate thoughts that can never be proved. It is that they are known to be use­ful. Man pos­i­tively needs gen­eral ideas & con­vic­tions that will give a mean­ing to his life & enable him to find a place for him­self in the uni­verse. He can stand the most incred­i­ble hard­ships when he is con­vinced that they make sense; he is crushed when on top of all his mis­for­tunes, he has to admit that he is tak­ing part in a ‘tale told by an idiot.’

During my medical education at the University of Basle I found vivisection horrible, barbarous and above all unnecessary

It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world color and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I can "experience" is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are . . . enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images.

Naturally, every age thinks that all ages before it were prejudiced, and today we think this more than ever and are just as wrong as all previous ages that thought so. How often have we not seen the truth condemned! It is sad but unfortunately true that man learns nothing from history.

For the alchemist the one primarily in need of redemption is not man, but the deity who is lost and sleeping in matter.

The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows it to realize its supreme purpose through him.

Even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky