Quotes About History

Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

Reading is another way we survive. It helps to know where we came from, how we got here. And most of all, for me, even though these low and empty islands are all I have ever known, when I open the front cover of a new book, it's like a door, and I can travel far away in place and time.

Dogs were with us from the very beginning. And of all the animals that walked the long centuries beside us, they always walked the closest. And then they paid the price. Fuck us.

Of all the animals that travelled the long road through the ages with us, dogs always walked closest.

Books turn out to be pretty durable if they're kept away from damp and rats. They can last hundreds of years, easy. Reading is another way we survive. It helps to know where we came from, how we got here. And most of all, for me, even thought these low and empty islands are all I have ever known, when I open the front cover of a new book, it's like a door, and I can travel far away in place and time.

Astrology is assured of recognition from psychology, without further restrictions, because astrology represents the summation of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity.

In studying the history of the human mind one is impressed again and again by the fact that the growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and that each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement. One could almost say that nothing is more hateful to man than to give up even a particle of his unconsciousness. Ask those who have tried to introduce a new idea!

The conclusion that the myth-makers thought in much the same way as we still think in dreams is almost self-evident. The first attempts at myth-making can, of course, be observed in children, whose games of make-believe often contain historical echoes. But one must certainly put a large question-mark after the assertion that myths spring from the "infantile" psychic life of the race. They are on the contrary the most mature product of that young humanity.

We have let the house our fathers built fall into decay, and now we try to break into Oriental palaces that our fathers never knew. Anyone who has lost the historical symbols and cannot be satisfied with substitutes is certainly in a very difficult position today: before him there yawns the void, and he turns away from it in horror. What is worse, the vacuum gets filled with absurd political and social ideas, which one and all are distinguished by their spiritual bleakness.

I always wonder about people who go to Rome as they might go, for example, to Paris or to London. Certainly Rome as well as these other cities can be enjoyed aesthetically but if you are affected to the depths of your being at every step by the spirit that broods there, if a remnant of a wall here and a column there gaze upon you with a face instantly recognised, then it becomes another matter entirely.

The living spirit grows and even outgrows its earlier forms of expression; it freely chooses the men in whom it lives and who proclaim it. This living spirit is eternally renewed and pursues its goal in manifold and inconceivable ways throughout the history of mankind. Measured against it, the names and forms which men have given it mean little enough; they are only the changing leaves and blossoms on the stem of the eternal tree.

Answer to Job : 601 was an anticipation in the grand manner, but everything still hung in mid air as mere revelation that never came down to earth. In view of these facts one cannot, with the best will in the world, see how Christianity, as we hear over and over again, is supposed to have burst upon world history as an absolute novelty. If ever anything had been historically prepared, and sustained and supported by the existing Weltanschauung, Christianity would be a classic example. XII

Consciousness did not exist from the beginning, and in every child it has to be built up anew in the first years of life. Consciousness is very weak in this formative period, and history shows us that the same is true of mankind—the unconscious easily seizes power.

If we follow the history of a neurosis with attention, we regularly find a critical moment when some problem emerged that was evaded.

It is in no sense sufficient to try to do so with nothing but a personalistically oriented psychology. Anyone who wants to treat serious dissociations must know something of the anatomy and evolutionary history of the mind he is setting out to cure.

If we seek genuine psychological understanding of the human being of our own time, we must know his spiritual history absolutely. We cannot reduce him to mere biological data, since he is not by nature merely biological but is a product also of spiritual presuppositions.

The archetype, as a glance at the history of religious phenomena will show, has a characteristically numinous effect, so that the subject is gripped by it as though by an instinct. What is more, instinct itself can be restrained and even overcome by this power, a fact for which there is no need to advance proofs.

nuestra actitud moderna habla con orgullo de las tinieblas de la superstición y de la credulidad medieval o primitiva, olvidando por completo que con nosotros llevamos todo el pasado, escondido en los sótanos del rascacielos que es nuestra conciencia racional.

La verdadera historia del espíritu no se conserva en los libros doctos, sino en el organismo vivo, anímico, de cada individuo.

Like most men, he had a tough time believing that his wife had had any kind of interesting life before she met him. Which was ridiculous on its face.

old Carnegie building

old Carnegie library

the Mount Rushmore KOA complex near

rotary-dial telephone