Man and His Symbols

We may think we have ourselves under control; yet a friend can easily tell us things about ourselves of which we have no knowledge.

dream treated as a direct, personal, and meaningful communication to the dreamer—a communication that uses the symbols common to all mankind,

Yet the emotions that effect us arc just the same. In fact, the terrors that stem from our elaborate civilization may be far more threatening than those that primitive people attribute to demons.

We are so accustomed to the apparently rational nature of our world that we can scarcely imagine anything happening that cannot be explained by common sense.

A theologian once told me that Ezekiel’s visions were nothing more than morbid symptoms, and that, when Moses and other prophets heard “voices” speaking to them, they were suffering from hallucinations.

The primitive man confronted by a shock of this kind would not doubt his sanity; he would think of fetishes, spirits, or gods.

in a dream, such concepts can express their unconscious meaning. In our conscious thoughts, we restrain ourselves within the limits of rational statements

statements that are much less colorful because we have stripped them of most of their psychic associations.

Even the most carefully defined philosophical or mathematical concept, which we are sure does not contain more than we have put into it, is nevertheless more than we assume.

The very numbers you use in counting are more than you take them to be. They are at the same time mythological elements (for the Pythagoreans, they were even divine); but you are certainly unaware of this when you use numbers for a practical purpose.