Quotes by Swiss Authors - Page 7

The central issue in the marriage is not well-being or happiness. It is, as this book has tried to demonstrate, salvation. Marriage involves not only a man and a woman who happily love each other and raise offspring together, but rather two people who are trying to individuate, to fond their soul's salvation.
Adolf Guggenbhuhl-Craig
We are creatures whose behavior cannot be simply explained as a striving for survival and happiness, for release of tension and contentment.
Adolf Guggenbhuhl-Craig
Marriage is one salvation pathway among many, although it contains different possibilities.
Adolf Guggenbhuhl-Craig
As soon as we confront concrete marriages with other foreign images-such as well-being, happiness, a home for children-marriage appears to be senseless, withered, moribund, and kept alive largely by a great apparatus of psychologists and marriage counselors. Marriage is dead. Long live marriage!
Adolf Guggenbhuhl-Craig
How I hated myself, thwarted, poisoned and tortured myself, made myself old and ugly. Never again, as I once fondly imagined, will I consider that Siddartha is clever. But one thing I have done well, which pleases me, which I must praise- I have now put an end to that self-detestation, to that foolish empty life. I commend you, Siddartha, that after so many years of folly, you have again a good idea, that you have accomplished something, that you have again heard the bird in your breast sing and followed it.
Hermann Hesse
There is nothing to opinions, theymay be beautiful or ugly, smart or foolish, everyone can support them ordiscard them. But the teachings, you’ve heard from me, are no opinion,and their goal is not to explain the world to those who seek knowledge.They have a different goal; their goal is salvation from suffering. This iswhat Gotama teaches, nothing else.
Hermann Hesse
I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.
C.G. Jung
What is addiction, really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood.
Alice MIller
Our guilt has its uses. It justifies much in the lives of others.
Max Frisch
The esoteric finds the Absolute within the traditions, as poets find poetry within the poems.
Frithjof Schuon
They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.
Hermann Hesse
Whether it is good or evil, whether life in itself is pain or pleasure, whether it is uncertain-that it may perhaps be this is not important-but the unity of the world, the coherence of all events, the embracing of the big and the small from the same stream, from the same law of cause, of becoming and dying.
Hermann Hesse
The time is a critical one, for it marks the beginning of the second half of life, when a metanoia, a mental transformation, not infrequently occurs.(on being 36 yrs old)
C.G. Jung
I take care of my flowers and my cats. And enjoy food. And that's living.
Ursula Andress
All you need for a movie is a gun and a cat.
Jean-Luc Godard
Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations...
C.G. Jung
They had been talking about astrology, a forbidden science that was not pursued in the cloister. Narcissus had said that astrology was an attempt to arrange and order the many different types of human beings according to their natures and destinies. At this point Goldmund had objected: "You're forever talking of differences - I've finally recognised a pet theory of yours. When you speak of the great difference that is supposed to exist between you and me, for instance, it seems to me that this difference is nothing but your strange determination to establish differences."Narcissus: "Yes. You've hit the nail on the head. That's it: to you, differences are quite unimportant; to me, they are what matters most. I am a scholar by nature; science is my vocation. And science is, to quote your words, nothing but the 'determination to establish differences.' Its essence couldn't be defined more accurately. For us, the men of science, nothing is as important as the establishment of differences; science is the art of differentiation. Discovering in every man that which distinguishes him from others is to know him.
Hermann Hesse
If the chick is not able to break the shell of his egg, he will die without being born. We are - chick. The world - is our egg. If we do not break the shell of the world, then we will die without being born
Hermann Hesse
The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.
Albert Einstein
Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds.
Albert Einstein
He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life - so he stayed, and did just that.
Alain de Botton
Hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
For him, behind every feeling and thought was the sense of the open door leading into nothingness. To be sure, he suffered from dread of many things, of madness, the police, insomnia, and also dread of death. But everything he dreaded he likewise desired and longed for at the same time. He was full of burning curiosity about suffering, destruction, persecution, madness and death.
Hermann Hesse
If we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us.--"The Content of the Psychoses
C.G. Jung
Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life...If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature...Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.
C.G. Jung
The world, my friend Govinda, is not imperfect, or on a slow path towards perfection: no, it is perfect in every moment, all sin already carries the divine forgiveness in itself.
Hermann Hesse
If Da Vinci had to tweet 5 times a day, we’d still be riding bicycles.
Natasha Tsakos
We are not here to question the possible,we are here to challenge the impossible
Natasha Tsakos
The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.
Albert Einstein
In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us.
C.G. Jung
A popular perception that political news is boring is no minor issue; for when news fails to harness the curiosity and attention of a mass audience through its presentational techniques, a society becomes dangerously unable to grapple with its own dilemmas and therefore to marshal the popular will to change and improve itself.
Alain de Botton
Theology must have the character of a living procession.
Karl Barth
It’s about running wild in a field of exclamation points chasing question marks
Natasha Tsakos
To love in the sense of passion-love is the contrary of to live. It is an impoverishment of one's being, an askesis without sequel, an inability to enjoy the present without imagining it as absent, a never-ending flight from possession.
Denis de Rougemont
Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
Alain de Botton
The more people you have to ask for permission, the more dangerous a project gets.
Alain de Botton
Judged against eternity, how little of what agitates us makes any difference.
Alain de Botton
Fanaticism is always a sign of repressed doubt
C.G. Jung
This capacity for objectivity and absoluteness amounts to an existential — and “preventive” — refutation of the ideologies of doubt: if a man is able to doubt, it is because there is certainty; likewise the very notion of illusion proves that man has access to reality. It follows that there are necessarily some men who know reality and who therefore have certainty; and the great spokesmen of this knowledge and certainty are necessarily the best of men. For if truth were on the side of doubt, the individual who doubted would be superior not only to these spokesmen, who have not doubted, but also to the majority of normal men across the millennia of human existence. If doubt conformed to the real, human intelligence would be deprived of its sufficient reason, and man would be less than an animal, for the intelligence of animals does not doubt the reality to which it is proportioned.
Frithjof Schuon
There is no greater cruelty than a genius stumbling over something idiotic.
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Man is much more the victim of his psychic constitution than its inventor.
C.G. Jung
We don't think. We think we think.
Natasha Tsakos
I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it.
C.G. Jung
Children are taught to look down on their nurses (nannies), to treat them as mere servants. When their task is completed the child is withdrawn or the nurse is dismissed. Her visits to her foster-child are discouraged by a cold reception. After a few years the child never sees her again. The mother expects to take her place, and to repair by her cruelty the results of her own neglect. But she is greatly mistaken; she is making an ungrateful foster-child, not an affectionate son; she is teaching him ingratitude, and she is preparing him to despise at a later day the mother who bore him, as he now despises his nurse.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Her deep romantic nature prevented her from demanding, from asking for that quenching. She wanted it to come freely, like flowers that are sent and not requested.
Sean Ferrer
All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.
Jean-Luc Goddard
I am thankful for all of those who said NO to me. It's because of them I'm doing it myself.
Albert Einstein
The most important choices we make in life are not the dramatic turning points such as a change of career, the person we marry, the country we emigrate to. The most important choices are the thoughts and feelings we choose to entertain, moment after moment, day after day. They shape our lives more surely than any outward circumstance. So why not opt for an experience of blessing – of blessing life moment after moment? After all, each moment is the repository of infinite possibilities, ever renewed.Pierre Pradervand, The Gentle Art of Blessing
Pierre Pradervand
On awakening, bless the day, for it is already full of unseen good which your blessing will call forth; for to bless is to acknowledge the unlimited good that is embedded in the very texture of the universe and awaiting each and all.To bless is to acknowledge the omnipresent, universal beauty, hidden to material eyes. It is to activate the law of attraction which for the furthest reaches of the universe will bring into your life exactly what you need to experience and enjoy.
Pierre Pradervand
To forget and to repress would be a good solution if there were no more to it than that. But repressed pain blocks emotional life and leads to physical symptoms. And the worst thing is that although the feelings of the abused child have been silenced at the point of origin, that is, in the presence of those who caused the pain, they find their voice when the battered child has children of his own.
Alice MIller
...there is no real advance in human reason, for what we gain in one direction we lose in another; for all minds start from the same point, and as the time spent in learning what others have thought is so much time lost in learning to think for ourselves, we have more acquired knowledge and less vigor of mind. Our minds like our arms are accustomed to use tools for everything, and to do nothing for themselves.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Logically enough, the office and the nunnery have been singularly popular in the imaginations of pornographers. We should not be surprised to learn that the erotic novels of the early modern period were overwhelmingly focused on debauchery and flagellation amongst clergy in vespers and chapels, just as contemporary Internet pornography is inordinately concerned with fellatios and sodomies performed by office workers against a backdrop of work stations and computer equipment.
Alain de Botton
At the heart of the pain created by sexual rejection is our habit of interpreting it as a moral judgement, when it might more accurately be categorized as a mere accident.
Alain de Botton
I'm not interested in age. People who tell me their age are silly. You're as old as you feel.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.
Albert Einstein
As long as God is a man, not a couple, the life of a woman, according to Hanna,is bound to remain as it is now, namely wretched, with woman as the proletarian of Creation, however smartly dressed.
Max Frisch
I've spoken of the patient Peter who was obsessively forced to make conquests with women, to seduce and then to abandon them, until he was at last able to experience how he himself had repeatedly been abandoned by his mother.
Alice MIller
We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings.
Albert Einstein
If we were entirely sane, if madness did not have a serious grip on one side of us, other people's tragedies would hold a great deal less interest for us.
Alain de Botton
But you will not spare a drop of pity because I am rich? We have death in our gilded courts, too. We have disease and cruelty, and not a breath of air or freedom. You cannot say our lives are easy, any more than I can say yours is. They are lives, and so they are HORRID!
Stefan Bachmann