Quotes from Robert A. Johnson

Heaven and skid row are separated only by an act of consciousness.

One of the great paradoxes in romantic love is that it never produces human relationship as long as it stays romantic. It produces drama, daring adventures, wondrous, intense love scenes, jealousies, and betrayals; but people never seem to settle into relationship with each other as flesh-and-blood human beings until they are out of the romantic love stage, until they love each other instead of being "in love.

Özverinin kanunu ÅŸudur: EÄŸer bir erkek yanl?? düzeyde sahip olduÄŸu ÅŸeyden vazgeçerse, bu ona doÄŸru düzeyde iade edilir.

We don't like anything that is "simple": To us "simple" means dull or dense or stupid. We have forgotten that simplicity is a need in human life: It is the human art of finding meaning and joy in the small, natural, and less dramatic things.

It is an inexorable law that no characteristic can be discarded;

Romantic love always consists in the projection of the soul-image. When a woman falls in love it is animus that she sees projected onto the mortal man before her. When a man drinks of the love potion, it is anima, his soul, that he sees superimposed on a woman.

Curiously, people usually resist their good qualities even more emphatically than they resist facing their negative qualities. There may be a character in your dream who behaves in a noble and courageous way. Since that inner person is part of you, its qualities are also yours. So long as you are facing your negative and immature traits squarely, you also have a duty to acknowledge the fine qualities in yourself, and to live them consciously.

Meaningful ritual and ceremony affirm our relationship to the sacred and nourish both the spiritual and secular worlds. Our inner nature needs acknowledgment from our conscious personality as much as our egos need to remember their source in the collective unconscious.

Just As Soon As" should be printed on dollar bills, replacing "In God We Trust" as the great American slogan.

The only hope for healing is to offer a better form of ecstasy, to upgrade so the addict will give up the stupid one.

When we're in love, we put our gold—our expectations—on the other person, and this obliterates her. There is no relatedness.

Sometimes men envisioned a feminine muse who inspired them to poetry, literature, art, or refined sensibility. Women, by contrast, often imagined the soul as a masculine presence that provided wisdom and strength.

Clement of Alexandria says in the Paedagogus: "Therefore, as it seems, it is the greatest of all disciplines to know oneself; for when a man knows himself, he knows God.

When one has grown strong and wise enough, the warring elements which cost so much suffering and anxiety, will become complementary elements and produce the great work of art which is your own life.

No aspect of the human psyche can live in a healthy state unless it is balanced by its complementary opposite. If the masculine mind tries to live without its "other half," the feminine soul, then the masculine becomes unbalanced, sick, and finally monstrous. Power without love becomes brutality. Feeling without masculine strength becomes woolly sentimentality. When one side of human nature grows out of balance with the other, it becomes a tyranny in the soul.

She often found herself caught in a rapture for minutes at a time, sometimes longer. But someone observed that she was never enraptured while she was cooking breakfast. If she were, she might burn it. Eternity can dovetail into our practical lives. It's possible for us to manage the toast and the rapture.

To advance from opposition (always a quarrel) to paradox (always holy) is to make a leap of consciousness. That leap takes us through the chaos of middle age and gives a vista that enlightens the remaining years of life. It is a valuable exercise to list the oppositions that we face, then try to restore them to the realm of paradox. We can start with these two sets of values: the everyday practical attitudes that nearly everyone agrees to and the religious instruction that we are given.

We incarnate the archetypes with our physical lives. Our individual lives are containers in which they materialize on the face of the earth, the battlegrounds where they fight their eternal, cosmic battles, the stages on which they perform the universal drama that becomes, in one particularized form, every human life.

The shadow is that which has not entered adequately into consciousness. It is the despised quarter of our being. It often has an energy potential nearly as great as that of our ego. If it accumulates more energy than our ego, it erupts as an overpowering rage or some indiscretion that slips past us; or we have a depression or an accident that seems to have its own purpose. The shadow gone autonomous is a terrible monster in our psychic house.

Often, when new growth occurs, the most dreadful things seem to happen, but then we see that they were exactly what was required.

Over the years I discovered that virtually everyone who comes to analysis is in some way facing a religious crisis, a term I prefer to neurosis , and every analysis is in some way a religious dilemma.

Much of a man's mute yearning for a woman is his need for her light to show him - as well as her - his true nature and godhood. Every woman holds this terrible-wonderful power in her hands.

We see this in some men at certain stages of life. A man who has always been tough, an aggressive go-getter, will suddenly be attacked by his bottled-up feminine side. It may take the form of an illness, a depression, a loss of interest in life. Suddenly he is moody, hyperemotional, indecisive. His wife has to make his decisions for him while he retreats into moods and hypochondria.

When a woman mediates beauty and grace to the world, often it is the Aphrodite or Venus energy at work.