The only important thing is to follow nature. A tiger should be a good tiger; a tree, a good tree. So people should be people. But to know what people are, one must follow nature and go alone, admitting the importance of the unexpected. Still, nothing is possible without love. . . . For love puts one in a mood to risk everything, and not to withhold important elements.

I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life - that is to say, over 35 - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.

...consciousness can keep only a few images in full clarity at one time, and even this clarity fluctuates.

In the second half of life the necessity is imposed of recognizing no longer the validity of our former ideals but of their contraries. Of perceiving the error in what was previously our conviction, of sensing the untruth in what was our truth, and of weighing the degree of opposition, and even of hostility, in what we took to be love.

Enlightenment doesnt occur from sitting around visualizing images of light, but from integrating the darker aspects of the Self into the conscious personality.

Free will is the ability to do gladly that which I must do.

If we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us. --"The Content of the Psychoses