A Quote by Carl Jung
We are in a far better position to observe instincts in animals or in primitives than in ourselves. This is due to the fact that we have grown accustomed to scrutinizing our own actions and to seeking rational explanations for them.
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There was an idea that God created man different from other animals, because man was rational and animals had drives and instincts. That idea of a rational man that was specially created went out the window when Darwin showed that we evolved from animal ancestors, that we have instincts, much as do animals, and that our instincts are very important. It was a much more sophisticated, nuanced, and rich view of the human mind.
Unlike rational thought, intuition cannot be 'taught' or even turned on. In fact, it is impossible to find or manipulate this intuitive consciousness using our rational mind—any more than we can grasp our own hand or see our own eye.
We are better able to study our neighbours than ourselves, and their actions than our own.
You can often give a better description of the fight between people, the essentials of it, by means of fantastic animals, the simple, primitive, naked instincts, than by depicting a specific situation. It is not the human animal we should describe, but ourselves as human animals.
From a purely external point of view there is no will; and to find will in any phenomenon requires a certain empathy; we observe aman's actions and place ourselves partly but not wholly in his position; or we act, and place ourselves partly in the position of an outsider.
The numerous evils to which individual persons are exposed are due to the defects existing in the persons themselves. We complain and seek relief from our own faults; we suffer from the evils which we, by our own free will, inflict on ourselves and ascribe them to God, who is far from being connected with them!
We owe the animals our profoundest apologies. Defenseless and unable to retaliate, they have suffered immense agonies under our domination that most of us have never witnessed or acknowledged. Now knowing better, we can act better, and acting better, we can live better, and give the animals, our children, and ourselves a true reason for hope and celebration.
Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.
Human beings are pattern-seeking animals. It's part of our DNA. That's why conspiracy theories and gods are so popular: we always look for the wider, bigger explanations for things.
We expect too much from our children. We exact from them a perfection which we are far from carrying out in ourselves; we require of them sacrifices much heavier, comparatively, than those of any grown-up person.
We wear a lot of labels in our lives, and it's so very easy to be defined by them. We have grown somehow accustomed to thinking of ourselves as a size eight or a size fourteen, as a capricorn or a taurus, as single or in love.
So far as this argument is concerned nonhuman animals and infants and retarded humans are in the same category; and if we use this argument to justify experiments on nonhuman animals we have to ask ourselves whether we are also prepared to allow experiments on human infants and retarded adults; and if we make a distinction between animals and these humans, on what basis can we do it, other than a bare-faced - and morally indefensible - preference for members of our own species?
Us as a people, we can't do it on our own. We have to understand that we're not each other's enemy. We have to stop discriminating against each other due to class and due to race and due to location or financial position.
There is nothing better than picking up sun-warmed tomatoes and smelling them, feeling them and scrutinizing their shiny skins for imperfections, dreaming of ways to serve them.
Human beings aren't rational animals; we're rationalizing animals who want to appear reasonable to ourselves.
What our leaders and pundits never let slip is that the terrorists - whatever else they might be - might also be rational human beings; which is to say that in their own minds they have a rational justification for their actions.
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