Quote collection
201 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It is necessary for the birthing process to begin to move in its own organic time. It is necessary that the artist have this sense of timing, that he or she respect... periods of receptivity as part of the mystery of creativity and creation."
"The daimonic is any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person. Sex and eros, anger and rage, and the craving for power are examples. The daimonic can be either creative or destructive and is normally both."
"The creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them."
"When you are completely absorbed or caught up in something, you become oblivious to things around you, or to the passage of time. It is this absorption in what you are doing that frees your unconscious and releases your creative imagination."
"A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence."
"All people are struggling to be creative in some way, and the artist is the one who has succeeded in this task of life."
"It is amazing how many hints and guides and intuitions for living come to the sensitive person who has ears to hear what his body is saying."
"There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change."
"One central need in life is to fulfill its own potential."
"Dogmatism of all kinds--scientific, economic, moral, as well as political--are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyer of our nicely ordered systems. (p. 76)"
"Tools and techniques ought to be an extension of consciousness, but they can just as easily be a protection from consciousness. Then the tools become defence mechanisms... against the unconscious."
"The daimonic refers to the power of nature rather than the superego, and is beyond good and evil. Nor is it man's 'recall to himself' as Heidegger and later Fromm have argued, for its source lies in those realms where the self is rooted in natural forces which go beyond the self and are felt as the grasp of fate upon us. The daimonic arises from the ground of being rather than the self as such."
"Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight."
"If we admit our depression openly and freely, those around us get from it an experience of freedom rather than the depression itself."
"Anxiety is an even better teacher than reality, for one can temporarily evade reality by avoiding the distasteful situation; but anxiety is a source of education always present because one carries it within."
"One longs for the presence of a leader like Lincoln, who openly admitted his doubts and as openly preserved his commitment."
"Humans have a habit of running faster when they have lost their way."
"It is well to remind ourselves that anxiety signifies a conflict, and so long as a conflict is going on, a constructive solution is possible."
"Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration."
"It may sound surprising when I say, on the basis of my own clinical practice as well as that of my psychological and psychiatric colleagues, that the chief problem of people in the middle decade of the twentieth century is emptiness."