I interpret mainly to let the patient know the limits of my understanding. The principle is that it is the patient and only the patient who has the answers.

~ D.W. Winnicott

There is a saying in the Tibetan scriptures: 'Knowledge must be burned, hammered, and beaten like pure gold. Then one can wear it as an ornament.' So when you receive spiritual instruction from the hands of another, you do not take it uncritically, but you burn it, you hammer it, you beat it, until the bright, dignified color of gold appears. Then you craft it into an ornament, whatever design you like, and you put it on.

~ Chogyam Trungpa

I love the silent hour of night,
For blissful dreams may then arise,
Revealing to my charmed sight
What may not bless my waking eyes.

~ Anne Brontë

Dreams are like archipelagos. Each dream may be unique and specific in its own right, but under the surface we may glimpse the presence of a continuum, the dream of dreams, which is the mythic fingerprint, the unconscious life theme, the theme of themes, for the dreaming subject. 

~ James Grotstein, 2000

I think every individual should strive to attain wisdom, to be a philosopher, not just people who happen to have studied philosophy. That's nothing. Formal education is nothing in itself... I think that th most important things the desire to know and to understand, and that's something people can do for themselves outside of educational establishments. 

~ Nadya Tolokonnikova

The pathway to individuation is a spiral process with each evolution of consciousness hitting the same bumps in the road. Jung observed that "the serious problems of life are never fully solved. If ever they should appear to be so it is a sure sign that something has been lost. The meaning and purpose of a problem seems to lie not in its solution but in our working at it incessantly. This alone preserves us from stultification and petrification.

 

Life does not accommodate you, it shatters you. It is meant to, and it couldn't do it better. Every seed destroys its container or else there would be no fruition. 

~ Florida Scott-Maxwell

If you bring forth that which is within you,
Then that which is within you
Will save you.
If you do not bring forth that
Which is within you,
Then that which is within you
Will destroy you.

~ The Gospel of Thomas, 70

The act of creative imagining, inventing, saying differently, crafting a metaphor or image, then crafting another metaphor or image when you go further or when you revise - all these take whatever you think "is" and make clear that other possibilities exist as well. The sense of possibility, the amplitude and freedom that sense of malleability brings - for me, that cannot help but be joyous.

~ Jane Hirshfield

I once saw a popular spiritual teacher addressing a recently bereaved woman. He said, "Your heartbreak is illusory and only the activity of the separate self. One day the separate self will vanish, along with all suffering".

And in that moment, I saw a deep, deep sickness and inhumanity at the heart of contemporary spirituality. The invalidation of trauma, the false promises, the power games, the suppression of the feminine. And I vowed to bow to that fucking broken heart as if it were God Herself.

Until the end of time.

~ Jeff Foster

A human life has seasons much as the earth has seasons, each time with its own particular beauty and power. …Life is neither linear nor stagnant. It is movement from mystery to mystery. Just as a year includes autumn and winter, life includes death, not as an opposite but as an integral part of the way life is made. 

~ Rachel Naomi Remen

I would rather be the child of a mother who has all the inner conflicts of the human being than be mothered by someone for whom all is easy and smooth, who knows all the answers, and is a stranger to doubt.

~ Donald Winnicott