Oracle

Carl Jung on the Importance of Psychology

If psychology did not exist, but only concrete objects, the one would actually have been destroyed and replaced by the other. But in reality, that is to say, in psychological experience, there is not one whit the less of urgency, anxiety, compulsiveness…

Hermann Hesse on Ego Death

Was it not his ego, his small, proud, anxious ego with which he had fought for so many years, which had always defeated him, always returned after every killing, outlawing joy, feeling fear? Was it not this which had finally found its death today, here in the forest, on this lovely…

Thomas Mann on Curiosity/Numinosity

The mania he then developed of thinking out musical problems, which he solved like chess problems, might make one fear lest he thought this contriving and mastering of technical difficulties was already composition. He spent hours in linking up, in the smallest…

Carl Jung on Hermitude

[A] certain solitude and isolation are inescapable conditions of life for the well-being of oneself and of the other, otherwise one cannot sufficiently be oneself. A certain slowness of life, which is like a standstill, will be unavoidable.

— Carl Jung, The Red Book

Ralph Waldo Emerson on Transformability

The philosophy we want is one of fluxions and mobility. The Spartan and Stoic schemes are too stark and stiff for our occasion. A theory of Saint John, and of non-resistance, seems, on the other hand, too thin and aerial. We want some coat woven of elastic…