“It appeared that way, Lawrence, but this raised the question of was mathematics really true or was it just a game played with symbols? In other words—are we discovering Truth, or just wanking?”

“In other words: Whatever the problem, be part of the solution. Don't just sit around raising questions and pointing out obstacles.”

“Everyone is born a poet - a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop?”

“I don't like the word 'allegorical', I don't like the word 'symbolic' - the word I really like is 'mythic', and people always think that means 'full of lies', whereas of course what it really means is 'full of truth which cannot be told in any other way but a story'.”

“However, the natural symbol, without our being sufficiently conscious of the fact, is identical with the reality of the world that appears to us, for every object in the natural world is at the same time a symbolic reality to us. The psyche certainly does not use an "object" of nature as a "symbol," but rather the experience of an "object" itself is always already symbolic experience. The star or tree in us is no less real and no less symbolic than it is in outward experience. For each possibility of experience either presupposes a spiritually forming, that is to say a symbolic activity, or is identical with this. That is, everything spiritual appears to us first not just in nature but as nature; or we could formulate this just as well the other way around: everything natural, whether outward or inward, appears to us as an image, that is to say as formed spirit. We are surrounded by images, inwardly and outwardly, but at the same time formed and determined in all our experiences by the natural symbol as though by a unitary natural-spiritual reality, for our psychic system only grasps that which appears to us as the real world through the world of natural symbolism.”

“Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.”