Inkeri Harri > Inkeri's Quotes

“Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriousity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.”
― Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles

“It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with.”
― Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot

“Childhood, after all, is the first precious coin that poverty steals from a child.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The House of Silk

“Where there is no imagination, there is no horror.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

“presume nothing”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles

“That which is clearly known hath less terror than that which is but hinted at and guessed.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“He who travels much has this advantage over others – that the things he remembers soon become remote, so that in a short time they acquire the vague and poetical quality which is only given to other things by time. He who has not traveled at all has this disadvantage – that all his memories are of things present somewhere, since the places with which all his memories are concerned are present.”
― Giacomo Leopardi

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”
― David Hume

“I rebel; therefore I exist.”
― Albert Camus

“You should not take old people who are already dead seriously. It does them injustice. We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don't mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. I, too, once put too high a value on time. For that reason I wished to be a hundred years old. In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”
― Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

“It is not true that the unconscious goal in the evolution of every conscious being (animal, man, mankind, etc) is its 'highest happiness': the case, on the contrary, is that every stage of evolution possesses a special and incomparable happiness neither higher nor lower but simply its own. Evolution does not have happiness in view, but evolution and nothing else.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality

“We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal; We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.”
― Erich Fromm, The Sane Society

“Nationalism, originally a progressive movement, replaced the bonds of feudalism and absolutism. The average man today obtains his sense of identity from his belonging to a nation, rather than from his being a "Son of Man." His objectivity, that is, his reason, is warped by this fixation. He judges the "stranger" with different criteria than the members of his own clan. His feelings toward the stranger are equally warped. Those who are not "familiar" by bonds of blood and soil (expressed a common language, customs, food, song, etc.) are looked upon with suspicion, and paranoid delusions about them can spring up at the slightest provocation. This incestuous fixation not only poisons the relationship of the individual to the stranger, but to the members of his own clan and to himself. The person who has not freed himself from the ties to blood and soil is not yet fully born as a human being; his capacity for love and reason are crippled; he does not experience himself nor his fellow man in their-and his own-human reality.”
― Eric Fromm

“Fog everywhere. Fog up the river where it flows among green airs and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.... Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

“The dream shows the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as he would like it to be, but as it is.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
― C.G. Jung

“In each of us there is another whom we do not know.”
― C.G. Jung, Civilization in Transition

“I early arrived at the insight that when no answer comes from within to the problems and complexities of life, they ultimately mean very little. Outward circumstances are no substitute for inner experience.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“They do not realize that a myth is dead if it no longer lives and grows. Our myth has become mute, and gives no answers.”
― C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend