Top 40 Robert A. Johnson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The place where light and dark begin to touch is where miracles arise.”

— Robert A. Johnson

2. “Love is not a doing but a state of being – a relatedness, a connectedness to another mortal, an identification with her or him that simply flows within me and through me, independent of my intentions or my efforts.”

— Robert A. Johnson

3. “The difference in a teacher and a mentor is that a mentor is interested in our soul.”

— Robert A. Johnson

4. “For many years of my life I thought one came down with a mood just as one comes down with a cold. But slowly I learned that moods are a product of purposeful unconsciousness and can be rectified by the very consciousness one worked so hard to evade.”

— Robert A. Johnson

5. “There is a universal sense in humans that there is unity and cohesion at the heart of life, and that it is possible for us to be consciously aware of it. So far as I can discover, it is this awareness of the primordial and essential unity of the human psyche that most religions and philosophies have referred to as enlightenment.”

— Robert A. Johnson

6. “Culture can only function if we live out the unwanted elements symbolically. All healthy societies have a rich ceremonial life. Less healthy ones rely on unconscious expressions: war, violence, psychosomatic illness, neurotic suffering, and accidents are very low-grade ways of living out the shadow. Ceremony and ritual are a far more intelligent means of accomplishing the same thing. Ceremonies.”

— Robert A. Johnson

7. “To honor and accept one’s own shadow is a profound spiritual discipline. It is whole-making and thus holy and the most important experience of a lifetime.”

— Robert A. Johnson

8. “The only hope for healing is to offer a better form of ecstasy, to upgrade so the addict will give up the stupid one.”

— Robert A. Johnson

9. “To suffer one’s confusion is the first step in healing.”

— Robert A. Johnson

10. “The essential ingredients for relationship are affection and commitment.”

— Robert A. Johnson

11. “Later I inquired into the origin of the word happy and found that it derives from the verb to happen. In other words, happiness is to be found simply from observing what happens. If you cannot be happy at the prospect of lunch, you are not likely to find happiness anywhere. What happens is happiness.”

— Robert A. Johnson

12. “The object of life is not happiness, but to serve God or the Grail. All of the Grail quests are to serve God. If one understands this and drops his idiotic notion that the meaning of life is personal happiness, then one will find that elusive quality immediately at hand.”

— Robert A. Johnson

13. “The purpose of learning to work with the unconscious is not just to resolve our conflicts or deal with our neuroses. We find there a deep source of renewal, growth, strength, and wisdom. We connect with the source of our evolving character; we cooperate with the process whereby we bring the total self together; we learn to tap that rich lode of energy and intelligence that waits within.”

— Robert A. Johnson

14. “Parrots learn profanity more easily than common phrases since we utter our curses with so much vigor. The parrot doesn’t know the meaning of these words, but he hears the energy invested in them. Even animals can pick up on the power we have hidden in the shadow!”

— Robert A. Johnson

15. “A man must consent to look to a foolish, innocent, adolescent part of himself for his cure. The inner fool is the only one who can touch his Fisher King wound.”

— Robert A. Johnson

16. “Romantic love always consists in the projection of the soul-image. When a woman falls in love it is animus that she sees projected onto the mortal man before her. When a man drinks of the love potion, it is anima, his soul, that he sees superimposed on a woman.”

— Robert A. Johnson

17. “If you can touch your shadow – within form – and do something out of your ordinary pattern, a great deal of energy will flow from it.”

— Robert A. Johnson

18. “We are presently dealing with the accumulation of a whole society that has worshiped its light side and refused the dark, and this residue appears as war, economic chaos, strikes, racial intolerance. The front page of any newspaper hurls the collective shadow at us.”

— Robert A. Johnson

19. “It sounds ironic to say that the cure for loneliness is aloneness. I don’t mean that you should just make yourself more miserable; I am prescribing instead a form of solitude that is meditative and open to your inner self.”

— Robert A. Johnson

20. “There is a story of a spiritual seeker who one day came to his master and asked, “In the olden days it is said that there were people who walked and talked with God. Why doesn’t this happen anymore?” The master replied, “Because nowadays no one will stoop so low.”

— Robert A. Johnson

21. “In alchemy one goes through four stages of development: the nigredo, in which one experiences the darkness and depression of life; the albedo, in which one sees the brightness of things; the rubedo, where one discovers passion; and finally the citrino, where one appreciates the goldenness of life.”

— Robert A. Johnson

22. “The unchosen thing is what causes the trouble. If you don’t do something with the unchosen, it will set up a minor infection somewhere in the unconscious and later take its revenge on you. Unlived life does not just “go away”...”

— Robert A. Johnson

23. “Once we become sensitive to dreams, we discover that every dynamic in a dream is manifesting itself in some way in our practical lives.”

— Robert A. Johnson

24. “Heaven and skid row are separated only by an act of consciousness.”

— Robert A. Johnson

25. “First we must learn to think mythologically. Powerful things happen when we touch the thinking which myths, fairy tales, and our own dreams bring to us. The terms and settings of the old myths are strange; they seem archaic and distant to us, but if we listen to them carefully and take them seriously, we begin to hear and to understand.”

— Robert A. Johnson

26. “It is not the monsters of the world who make such chaos but the collective shadow to which every one of us has contributed.”

— Robert A. Johnson

27. “Each of us is part heroine or hero and part coward, part parent and part child, part saint and part thief. It is in learning to identify these great archetypal motifs within ourselves, learning to honor each one as a legitimate human trait, learning to live out the energy of each in a constructive way, that we make inner work a great odyssey of the spirit.”

— Robert A. Johnson

28. “The tendency to see one’s shadow “out there” in one’s neighbor or in another race or culture is the most dangerous aspect of the modern psyche. It has created two devastating wars in this century and threatens the destruction of all the fine achievements of our modern world. We all decry war but collectively we move toward it. It is not the monsters of the world who make such chaos but the collective shadow to which every one of us has contributed.”

— Robert A. Johnson

29. “Modern western man has some basic misconceptions about the nature of happiness. The origin of the word is instructive: happiness stems from the root verb to happen, which implies that our happiness is what happens.”

— Robert A. Johnson

30. “The mystery is this: there is one right thing and only one right thing to do at every moment. We can either follow or resist the slender threads.”

— Robert A. Johnson

31. “The message is unmistakable; our own healing proceeds from that overlap of what we call good and evil, light and dark. It is not that the light element alone does the healing; the place where light and dark begin to touch is where miracles arise. This middle place is a mandorla.”

— Robert A. Johnson

32. “It is perhaps this human tendency to see everything as “good” or “bad” that creates the greatest obstacle to accepting and utilizing our varied inner personalities.”

— Robert A. Johnson

33. “Each of us is a microcosm in which the universal process actualizes itself.”

— Robert A. Johnson

34. “If you wish to give your children the best possible gift, the best possible entry into life, remove your shadow from them. To give them a clean heritage, psychologically speaking, is the greatest legacy.”

— Robert A. Johnson

35. “It is an inexorable law that no characteristic can be discarded;.”

— Robert A. Johnson

36. “It wounded me enough to ground me, but not so much as to knock all the life out of me.”

— Robert A. Johnson

37. “Many people use the energy of their nostalgia for paradise trying to get back to a previous state of grace, back to childhood. This is not possible, and people are wiser to use their energy to progress to the Heavenly Jerusalem. Regression is deadly; progression wins one’s soul.”

— Robert A. Johnson

38. “You can give another person a precious gift if you will allow him to talk without contaminating his speech with your own material.”

— Robert A. Johnson

39. “Strangely, the best can come from this neglected quarter. We will go to almost any length to avoid this painful paradox; but in that refusal we only confine ourselves to the useless experience of contradiction. Contradiction brings the crushing burden of meaninglessness. One can endure any suffering if it has meaning; but meaninglessness is unbearable. Contradiction is barren and destructive, yet paradox is creative. It is a powerful embracing of reality.”

— Robert A. Johnson

40. “While contradiction is static and unproductive, paradox makes room for grace and mystery.”

— Robert A. Johnson

41. “If it has an impact, it means there is a war inside me. You set it off, but what you set off is my business. Anything that can burn in a person should burn. Only the things that are fireproof are worth keeping. If you can hurt my feelings, they are better off hurt, because it’s an error in me.”

— Robert A. Johnson

42. “We don’t like anything that is “simple”: To us “simple” means dull or dense or stupid. We have forgotten that simplicity is a need in human life: It is the human art of finding meaning and joy in the small, natural, and less dramatic things.”

— Robert A. Johnson

43. “The beginning of wisdom is a firm grasp of the obvious.”

— Robert A. Johnson

44. “Carl Jung said that if you find the psychic wound in an individual or a people, there you also find their path to consciousness.”

— Robert A. Johnson

45. “Our egos divide the world into positive and negative, good and bad. Most aspects of our shadows, these qualities that we see as “negative,” would in fact be valuable strengths if we made them conscious. Characteristics that look immoral, barbaric, or embarrassing to us are the “negative” side of a valuable energy, a capacity we could make use of. You will never find anything in the unconscious that will not be useful and good when it is made conscious and brought to the right level.”

— Robert A. Johnson

46. “One of the great paradoxes in romantic love is that it never produces human relationship as long as it stays romantic. It produces drama, daring adventures, wondrous, intense love scenes, jealousies, and betrayals; but people never seem to settle into relationship with each other as flesh-and-blood human beings until they are out of the romantic love stage, until they love each other instead of being “in love.”

— Robert A. Johnson

47. “The quickest way I know to break a person is to give him or her two sets of contradicting values – which is exactly what we do, in modern culture, with our Sunday and Monday moralities. We are taught by Christianity to follow a set of values that are almost entirely disregarded in everyday business life. How is a person to cope?”

— Robert A. Johnson