The Art of Tetman Callis

“In Christianity, Mohammedanism, and Judaism, the personality of the divinity is taught to be final—which makes it comparatively difficult for the members of these communions to understand how one may go beyond the limitations of their own anthrpomorphic divinity. The result has been, on the one hand, a general obfuscation of the symbols, and on […]

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“What is the difference in matrimonial affairs, between the mercenary and the prudent motive? Where does discretion end, and avarice begin?” – Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

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“In the Year of Our Lord 1682 To ye aged and beloved, Mr. John Higginson: There be now at sea a ship called Welcome, which has on board 100 or more of the heretics and malignants called Quakers, with W. Penn, who is the chief scamp, at the head of them. The General Court has […]

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“Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. If the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other or ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the least. They always continue to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards to have their share of vexation; and it is better […]

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“Schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to wield together again the deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death—the […]

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“The inflated ego of the tyrant is a curse to himself and his world—no matter how his affairs may seem to prosper. Self-terrorized, fear-haunted, alert at every hand to meet and battle back the anticipated aggressions of his environment, which are primarily the reflections of the uncontrollable impulses to acquisition within himself, the giant of […]

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“Sentimentality is sister to brutality, and the two are never very far apart.” – Carl Gustav Jung, Symbols of Transformation (trans. R.F.C. Hull)

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“Everything young grows old, all beauty fades, all heat cools, all brightness dims, and every truth becomes stale and trite. For all these things have taken on shape, and all shapes are worn thin by the working of time; they age, sicken, crumble to dust—unless they change. But change they can, for the invisible spark […]

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“The spirit of evil is fear, negation, the adversary who opposes life in its struggle for eternal duration and thwarts every great deed, who infuses into the body the poison of weakness and age through the treacherous bite of the serpent; he is the spirit of regression, who threatens us with bondage to the mother […]

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“All life is a loss of balance and a struggling back into balance. We find this return home in religion and art.” – Karl Joël, Seele und Welt (trans. R.F.C. Hull)

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“You don’t need people to tell you you’re right all the time. You need people to tell you that you’re wrong.” – John Bogle (interviewed by Michael Regan in Bloomberg Markets)

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“There is a psychic reality which is just as pitiless and just as inexorable as the outer world, and just as useful and helpful, provided one knows how to circumvent its dangers and discover its hidden treasures.” – Carl Gustav Jung, Symbols of Transformation (trans. R.F.C. Hull)

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“A symbol is an indefinite expression with many meanings, pointing to something not easily defined and therefore not fully known. But the sign always has a fixed meaning, because it is a conventional abbreviation for, or a commonly accepted indication of, something known.” – Carl Gustav Jung, Symbols of Transformation (trans. R.F.C. Hull)

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“All passion is a challenge to fate, and what it does cannot be undone.” – Carl Gustav Jung, Symbols of Transformation (trans. R.F.C. Hull)

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“In so far as tomorrow is already contained in today, and all the threads of the future are already laid down, a deeper knowledge of the present might render possible a moderately far-sighted prognosis of the future.” – Carl Gustav Jung, Symbols of Transformation (trans. R.F.C. Hull)

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“What say you? It is useless? Ay, I know! But who fights ever hoping for success? I fought for lost cause, and for fruitless quest! You there, who are you?—You are thousands! Ah! I know you now, old enemies of mine! Falsehood! Have at you! Ha! and Compromise! Prejudice! Treachery! Surrender, I? Parley? No, never! […]

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“The culture-creating mind is ceaselessly employed in stripping experience of everything subjective, and in devising formulas to harness the forces of nature and express them in the best way possible. It would be a ridiculous and unwarranted presumption on our part if we imagined that we were more energetic or more intelligent than the men […]

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“Nothing is achieved by merely negative criticism. It is justified only to the degree that it is creative.” – Carl Gustav Jung, “Answer to Job” (trans. R.F.C. Hull)

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“Myth is not fiction: it consists of facts that are continually repeated and can be observed over and over again. It is something that happens to man, and men have mythical fates just as much as the Greek heroes do.” – Carl Gustav Jung, “Answer to Job” (trans. R.F.C. Hull)

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“Perfection is a masculine desideratum, while woman inclines by nature to completeness. And it is a fact that, even today, a man can stand a relative state of perfection much better and for a longer period than a woman, while as a rule it does not agree with women and may even be dangerous for […]

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“If you shift the formula a bit and substitute for God some other power, for instance the world or money, you get a complete picture of Western man—assiduous, fearful, devout, self-abasing, enterprising, greedy, and violent in his pursuit of the goods of this world: Possessions, health, knowledge, technical mastery, public welfare, political power, conquest, and […]

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“Any honest thinker has to admit the insecurity of all metaphysical positions, and in particular of all creeds. He has also to admit the unwarrantable nature of all metaphysical assertions and face the fact that there is no evidence whatever for the ability of the human mind to pull itself up by its own bootstrings, […]

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“The conflict between science and religion is in reality a misunderstanding of both. Scientific materialism has merely introduced a new hypostasis, and that is an intellectual sin. It has given another name to the supreme principle of reality and has assumed that this created a new thing and destroyed an old thing. Whether you call […]

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“Matter is an hypothesis. When you say ‘matter,’ you are really creating a symbol for something unknown, which may just as well be ‘spirit’ or anything else; it may even be God. Religious faith, on the other hand, refuses to give up its pre-critical Weltanschauung. In contradiction to the saying of Christ, the faithful try […]

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“Great innovations never come from above; they come invariably from below, just as trees never grow from the sky downward, but upward from the earth.” – Carl Gustav Jung, “The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man” (trans. R.F.C. Hull)

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“Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction.” – Francis Picabia

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“Whenever you hear anyone talking about a cultural or even about a human problem, you should never forget to inquire who the speaker really is. The more general the problem, the more he will smuggle his own, most personal psychology into the account he gives of it. This can, without a doubt, lead to intolerable […]

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“Every good quality has its bad side, and nothing good can come into the world without at once producing a corresponding evil. This painful fact renders illusory the feeling of elation that so often goes with consciousness of the present—the feeling that we are the culmination of the whole history of mankind, the fulfilment and […]

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“We may be able to indicate the limits of consciousness, but the unconscious is simply the unknown psyche and for that very reason illimitable because indeterminable. Such being the case, we should not be in the least surprised if the empirical manifestations of unconscious contents bear all the marks of something illimitable, something not determined […]

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“No matter how much parents and grandparents may have sinned against the child, the man who is really adult will accept these sins as his own condition which has to be reckoned with. Only a fool is interested in other people’s guilt, since he cannot alter it. The wise man learns only from his own […]

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