Aniela Jaffé > Quotes

“Man is the only creature with the power to control instinct by his own will, but he is also able to suppress, distort, and wound it - and an animal, to speak metaphorically, is never so wild and dangerous as when it is wounded.”
― Aniela Jaffé, Man and His Symbols

“The unconscious is pure nature, and, like nature, pours out its gifts in profusion. But left to itself and without the human response from consciousness, it can (again like nature) destroy its own gifts and sooner or later sweep them into annihilation.”
― Aniela Jaffé, Man and His Symbols

“In the middle of our century, the purely abstract picture without any regular order of forms and colors has become the most frequent expression in painting. The deeper the dissolution of "reality," the more the picture loses its symbolic content. The reason for this lies in the nature of the symbol and its function. The symbol is an object of the known world hinting at something unknown; it is the known expressing the life and sense of the inexpressible. But in merely abstract paintings, the world of the known has completely vanished. Nothing is left to form a bridge to the unknown.”
― Aniela Jaffé, Man and His Symbols

“mathematician Andreas Speiser therefore calls “fratres in Platone” all those who in religious questions follow not faith alone, but the scientific conscience, the “best legacy of the Hellenes”, and who limit their statements accordingly. There aren’t many of them, but they wander through the ages, “a small band of honest folk, the salt of the earth, occasionally protesting, often paying for their courage with their life”.”
― Aniela Jaffé, The Myth of Meaning

“Ultimate knowledge and the destruction of the world are the two aspects of the discovery of the primal ground of nature.”
― Aniela Jaffé, Man and His Symbols

“equivalent to nonsuffering; yet the resilience of the self-aware and self-transforming consciousness can fortify us against the perils of the irrational and the rational, against the world within and the world without.”
― Aniela Jaffé, The Myth of Meaning