Following is a list of meaningful quotes to help us reflect on why we would invest in the work of
therapy. These words remind us that in many ways, our most important task in this life
is to do the work of becoming.

“One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore
for a very long time.”
Andre Gide

“It takes so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment
or the courage to pay the price.

One has to abandon altogether the search for security and reach out to the risk of living with both arms.  One has to embrace the world like a lover, and yet demand no easy return of love.

  One has to accept pain as a condition of existence.  One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of existence.  One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to the total acceptance of living and dying.”

Morris L. West
The Shoes of the Fisherman

“Every one of us gladly turns away from his problems; if possible, they must not be mentioned, or, better still, their existence is denied.  We wish to make our lives simple, certain, and smooth, and for that reason problems are taboo.  We want to have certainties and no doubts—results and no experiments—without even seeing that certainties can arise only through doubt and results only through experiment.  The artful denial of a problem will not produce conviction; on the contrary, a wider and higher consciousness is required to give us the certainty and clarity we need.”
C.G. Jung,
Collected Works, Vol. 8

“Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them he enters suffering
in order that they may have existence.”
Leon Bloy

“Every blade of grass has its Angel that bends over it and whispers, ‘Grow, grow.’”
The Talmud

“Problems exist because we exist and mostly because we exist in relationship with each other.  Reactions are always a part of the problem because it is in and through them that we experience the sadness, pain, and tension that subjectively define a problem for us.  Our reactions are part of the problem, but, as we understand and integrate them, they become part of the solution.”
Eugene Kennedy,
Living with Everyday Problems

“One is always in the dark about one’s own personality. 
One needs others to get to know oneself.”
Carl Jung,
Jung Speaks

“Oh the comfort, the inexpressible comfort, of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as it is, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful friend will take and sift them, keeping what is worth keeping, and then, with the breath of kindness, blowing the rest away.”
Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot)

“We become fully conscious only of what we are able to express to someone else. 
We may already have had a certain inner intuition about it,
but it must remain vague so long as it is unformulated.”
Paul Tournier,
The Meaning of Persons

“What moves (wo)men of genius, or rather, what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.”
Eugene Delacroix

“Unless we cop out in some way, the challenge to bring more of ourselves into life is the healthiest kind of problem we can have.  It looks different at different ages—a boy learns to be a friend and then to be a husband and a father and it is not ended then—each stage has a cluster of challenges that demand something more of him that is clean and true.  We go through life mining our own resources, building new dimensions of ourselves on the structures we have just laid down.  The everyday problems come in connection with growing.  These are always invitations to develop and come to grips with the difficulties that each new moment presents. 
We don’t really get through life by solving problems in a final way but by responding more adequately as we move along.”
Eugene Kennedy,
Living with Everyday Problems

“Love asks people to become more of their true selves in each other’s presence and to become more steadily alive and sensitive to each other’s person.”
Eugene Kennedy,
Living with Everyday Problems

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
James Baldwin

“How beautiful, how grand and liberating this experience is, when people learn to help each other.  It is impossible to overemphasize the immense need humans have to be really listened to, to be taken seriously, to be understood.

  Modern psychology has brought it very much to our attention.  At the very heart of all psychotherapy is this type of relationship in which one can tell everything, just as
a little child will tell all to his mother. 

  No one can develop freely in this world and find a full life without feeling understood
by at least one person…

  He who would see himself clearly must open up to a confidant freely chosen
and worthy of such trust.”

Paul Tournier, M.D.

“The unconscious wants truth.  It ceases to speak to those who want
something else more than truth.”
Adrienne Rich

“The new gullibility of our particular time is not that of the man who believes too much, but that of the man who believes too little—the man who has lost his sense of the miracle.  When awe and wonder depart from our awareness depression sets in, and after its blanket has lain smotheringly upon us for a while, despair may ensue, or the quest for kicks begin.  The loss of wonder, of awe, or the sense of the sublime, is a condition leading to the death of the soul.  There is no more withering state than that which takes all things for granted. 
The blasé attitude means spiritual, emotional, intellectual and creative death.”
Edmond Fuller
Man in Modern Fiction

“Make your own recovery the first priority in your life.”
Robin Norwood

  "Birth is only one particular step in a continuum which begins with conception and ends with death.  All that is between these two poles is a process of giving birth to one's potentialities, of bringing to life all that is potentially given in the two cells...the development of the self is never completed; even under best conditions only part of man's potentialities is realized. 
Man always dies before he is fully born."  
Erich Fromm
Man for Himself 

“There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end.  It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, ‘I never merited this grace,’ quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. 

  ‘I won’t have it.  The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright.  We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus. 

  There is something deadening about going through life cautiously.”

Annie Dillard

“The woman who sweats under her mask, whose role makes her itch with discomfort, who hates the division in herself, is already beginning to be free.” 
Thomas Merton

“The most important decisions of our lives will require us to forsake invisibility and risk becoming visible. Whenever you choose to seize a divine moment, you move from the isolation of invisibility to the dangers of visibility in order to make what is invisible visible.”   
Erwin McManus
Seizing Your Divine Moment

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot)

“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially
on their children than the unlived life of the parent.”
C.G. Jung

“I shut my eyes in order to see.”
Paul Gauguin

“Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want so that they will be happier.  The way it actually works is the reverse.  You must first BE who you really are, then, DO what you need to do,
in order to HAVE what you want.”
Margaret Young

“Man can learn nothing except by going from the known to the unknown.” 
Claude Bernard

“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”
Jalal ud-Din Rumi

Note: I have not altered androcentric—or male-centered—language in these quotes.  I recognize that  the language is exclusionary and hope that women will ‘read themselves into the text’ in order to make good use of the concepts presented here.