- Dr. Carl Jung

Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar's gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart throughout the world.

There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-halls, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul."

- Dr. Sigmund Freud

It is a mistake to believe that a science consists in nothing but conclusively proved propositions, and it is unjust to demand that it should. It is a demand only made by those who feel a craving for authority in some form and a need to replace the religious catechism by something else, even if it be a scientific one. ... Science in its catechism has but few apodictic precepts; it consists mainly of statements which it has developed to varying degrees of probability. ... The capacity to be content with these approximations to certainty and the ability to carry on constructive work despite the lack of final confirmation are actually a mark of the scientific habit of mind.

- Prof. Saul Bellow -in Allan Bloom, 'Closing of the American Mind'

In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves--to that part of us which is conscious of a higher consciousness, by means of which we make final judgements and put every thing together.

The independence of this consciousness, which has the strength to be immune to the noise of history and the distractions of our immediate surroundings, is what the life struggle is all about. The soul has to find and hold its ground against hostile forces, sometimes embodied in ideas which frequently deny its very existence, and which indeed often seem to be trying to annul it altogether.

- Prof. Allan Bloom -in, 'Closing of the American Mind'

Despite all efforts to pervert it, the question that every young person asks, 'Who am I?,' the powerful urge to folllow the Delphic command, 'Know thyself,' which is born in each of us, means in the first place, 'What is man?' . . .

Most students will be content with what our present considers relevant; others will have a spirit of enthusiasm that subsides as family and ambition provide them with other objects of interest; a small number will spend their lives in an effort to be autonomous.

- Prof. Saul Bellow -in Saul Bellow, 'Ravelstein'

'He used to quote me to myself.' He had dug up a statement I had made about modern disenchantment. Under the debris of modern ideas the world was still there to be rediscovered. And his way of putting it was that the grey net of abstraction covering the world in order to simplify and explain it in a way that served our cultural ends has become the world in our eyes. . . .

We need to know--our deep human need, however, can't be satisfied by these terms. We can't climb out of the pit of 'culture' and the 'ideas' that supposedly express it. The right words would be of great help. But even more, a gift for reading reality--the impulse to put your loving face to it and press your hands against it.