Philosophy Quotes

"The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination."

- Carl Rogers

"The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived."

- Søren Kierkegaard

"Every man Dies; not every man lives"

- William Wallace

"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other."

- Charles Dickens

"The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how things are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of grater freedom is canceled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us. The less we understand of what our [forebears] sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"We are born at a given moment, in a given place, and like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season in which we are born."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"No one knows just how the idea of a soul or the supernatural started... It probably had its origin in the general laziness of mankind."

- John B. Watson

"Psychology, as the behaviorist views it, is a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science which needs introspection as little as do the sciences of chemistry and physics.... The position is taken here that the behavior of man and the behavior of animals must be considered in the same plane."

- John B. Watson

"Every psychological explanation comes sooner or later to lean either on biology or on logic (or on sociology, but this in turn leads to the same alternatives)."

- Jean Piaget

"The real is what resists symbolization absolutely"

- Jacques Lacan

"The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom."

- Jacques Lacan

"But what Freud showed us… was that nothing can be grasped, destroyed, or burnt, except in a symbolic way, as one says, in effigie, in absentia."

- Jacques Lacan

"I am there where it is spoken that the universe is a defect in the purity of non-being."

- Jacques Lacan

"...Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is, there wouldn’t even be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack."

- Jacques Lacan

"Nothing is more practical than a good theory."

- Kurt Lewin

"Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers."

- Jacques Lacan

"Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve."

- Erich Fromm

"The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers."

- Erich Fromm

"There is direction but there is no destination."

- Carl Rogers

"The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination."

- Carl Rogers

"Spring, summer, and fall fill us with hope; winter alone reminds us of the human condition."

- Mignon McLaughlin

"Life is a journey that must be travelled no matter how bad the roads and accommodations."

- Oliver Goldsmith

"7 Cardinal rules for life"

"Rules of a Creators Life..."

"Ever since Freud made his famous, and in my view disastrous, volte-face in 1897, when he decided that the childhood seductions he had believed to be aetiologically important were nothing more than the products of his patients' imaginations, it has been extremely unfashionable to attribute psychopathology to real-life experiences."

"Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end."