11 quotes
While reflecting an indisputable aspect of reality, it can falsify the actual truth in a most misleading way.
The Undiscovered Self (1958)
Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and considered by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being.
The Undiscovered Self (1958)
You can take away a man's gods, but only to give him others in return.
The Undiscovered Self (1958)
The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual.
The Undiscovered Self (1958)
We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a "metamorphosis of the gods," i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols.
The Undiscovered Self (1958)
Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science.
The Undiscovered Self (1958)
Reason alone does not suffice.
The Undiscovered Self (1958)
Any theory based on experience is necessarily statistical; that is to say, it formulates an ideal average which abolishes all exceptions at either end of the scale and replaces them by an abstract mean.
The Undiscovered Self (1958)
It is astounding that man, the instigator, inventor and vehicle of all these developments, the originator of all judgements and decisions and the planner of the future, must make himself such a quantité negligeable.
The Undiscovered Self (1958)
All mass movements, as one might expect, slip with the greatest ease down an inclined plane represented by large numbers. Where the many are, there is security; what the many believe must of course be true; what the many want must be worth striving for, and necessary, and therefore good.
The Undiscovered Self (1958)
Just as man as a social being, cannot in the long run exist without a tie to the community, so the individual will never find the real justification for his existence, and his own spiritual and moral autonomy, anywhere except in an extramundane principle capable of relativizing the overpowering influence of external factors.
The Undiscovered Self (1958)