Quotes About Meaning

22]"The fact is that archetypal images are so packed with meaning in themselves that people never think of asking what they really do mean...In reality, however, he has merely discovered that up till then he has never thought about his images at all. And when he starts thinking about them, he does so with the help of what he calls "reason"—which in point of fact is nothing more than the sum-total of all his prejudices and myopic viwes.

It consisted essentially in a dialectical gymnastics which gave the symbol of speech, the word, an absolute meaning, so that words came in the end to have a substantiality with which the ancients could invest their Logos only by attributing to it a mystical value. The great achievement of scholasticism was that it laid the foundations of a solidly built intellectual function, the sine qua non of modern science and technology.

Before the beginning of this century, Freud and Josef Breuer had recognized that neurotic symptoms—hysteria, certain types of pain, and abnormal behavior—are in fact symbolically meaningful. They are one way in which the unconscious mind expresses itself, just as it may in dreams; and they are equally symbolic.

The sign is always less than the concept it represents, while a symbol always stands for something more than its obvious and immediate meaning. Symbols, moreover, are natural and spontaneous products. No genius has ever sat down with a pen or a brush in his hand and said: "Now I am going to invent a symbol.

This fact, as I shall later explain, has a direct and important bearing upon the interpretation of dreams. It is obvious that if you assume the dream to be symbolic, you will interpret it differently from a person who believes that the essential energizing thought or emotion is known already and is merely "disguised" by the dream. In the latter case, dream interpretation makes little sense, for you find only what you already know.

no man can know himself unless he know what and not who he is,51 on whom he depends and whose he is (for by the law of truth no one belongs to himself), and to what end he was made.

God is not dead. Now, as ever, he liveth.

what am I to do here?

Probably, as in all metaphysical questions, both are true: Life is or has meaning and meaninglessness. I cherish the anxious hope that meaning will preponderate and win the battle.

Sensation establishes what is actually given, thinking enables us to recognize its meaning, feeling tells us its value, and finally intuition points to the possibilities of the whence and whither that lie within the immediate facts. In this way, we can orientate ourselves with respect to the immediate world as completely as when we locate a place geographically by latitude and longitude.

Intuition does not say what things 'mean' but sniffs out their possibilities. 'Meaning' is given by thinking.

no such thing as chance, and that every act and every expression has its own meaning, determined by the inner feelings and wishes of the individual.

You must know one thing above all: a succession of words does not have only one meaning. But men strive to assign only a single meaning to the sequence of words, in order to have an unambiguous language.

Today has meaning only if it stands between yesterday and tomorrow.

It is always helpful, when we set out to interpret a dream, to ask: What conscious attitude does it compensate

A sense of a wider meaning to one's existence is what raises a man beyond mere getting and spending.

Dreams pave the way for life, and they determine you without you understanding their language.

The words that oscillate between nonsense and supreme meaning are the oldest and truest.

This new thought was a turning-point in the development of my psychology. It meant that I gradually gave up following associations that led far away from the text of a dream. I chose to concentrate rather on the associations to the dream itself, believing that the latter expressed something specific that the unconscious was trying to say.

Since faith revolves round those central and perennially important "dominant ideas" which alone give life a meaning, the prime task of the psychotherapist must be to understand the symbols anew, and thus to understand the unconscious, compensatory striving of his patient for an attitude that reflects the totality of the psyche.

visul este o autoprezentare spontan?, într-o form? de exprimare simbolic?, a situaÅ£iei actuale a inconÅŸtientului.

How are you fulfilling your life's task ([your] "mission"), your raison d'être, the meaning and purpose of your existence? This is the question of individuation, the most fateful of all questions. . .

A comment on these men is made in the dream: "It is said they are dead." But Henry is alone. Who makes the statement? It is a voice—and when a voice is heard in a dream it is a most meaningful occurrence. Dr. Jung identified the appearance of a voice in dreams with an intervention of the Self. It stands for a knowledge that has its roots in the collective fundamentals of the psyche. What the voice says cannot be disputed.

Nothing brings the relentless flight of time and the cruel perishability of all blossoms more painfully to our consciousness than an inactive and empty life.