Quotes & Sayings About Sense And Nonsense

Love is about giving, about caring for the other person's welfare. Love is treating someone, in the Kantian sense, never as a means but as an end in themselves. Love is sacrifice, love is something you work at, something you build like a house or tend like a plant, brick by brick, drop by drop, day by day. Nonsense. Old wives' tales, old husbands' tales. That is affection they are talking about, that is companionship, that is charity, that is tickets for the Cancer Research Ball. You must ask the young if you want to know what love is. Only they are deep enough in it to describe. We older ones have clues and simulacra, we base our judgement, like pathologists do, on the dents and scars and sediments of hearts long kept in formaldehyde. It is the pulsing heart you want to probe: the pulsing, beating, leaping, dipping, fluttering heart of a seventeen-year-old. — A.P.

For my part I think the Learned, and Unlearned Blockhead pretty equal; for 'tis all one to me, whether a Man talk Nonsense, or unintelligible Sense, I am diverted and edified alike by either; the one enjoys himself less, but suffers his Friends to do it more; the other enjoys himself and his own Humour enough, but will let no body else do it in his Company. — Mary Astell

Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other — James Thurber

Proselytism is solemn nonsense; it makes no sense. We need to get to know each other, listen to each other and improve our knowledge of the world around us. — Pope Francis

What happens a lot with songwriting is that a melody or rhythm or something stays with you like catching a cold. And during that time what happens is that I can then fit things on to it, it all fits and glues together. Sometimes it's crazy cos it can almost be anything. But if you catch the cold then the nonsense makes sense. It's like you're getting beamed it, like with a ouija board and something's pushing your hand. It's not a pleasant experience necessarily. — Thom Yorke

If the rules of a language are followed, words usually make sense. But these very rules can stir the impulse to rebel. We're obliged to keep trying to convey meaning through correct sentences. After a while, the good-soldier rigidity of polished prose can begin to seem dull, and it gets harder to resist the temptation of nonsense. — Joanna Scott

When the doubters tell you it can't be done and all kind of tragedies will come your way, I say nonsense. If you can get to the very root of who you are and make something happen from it, my sense tells me you are going to surprise yourself. — Vidal Sassoon

What is it we heartily wish of each other? Is it to be pleased and flattered? No, but to be convicted and exposed, to be shamed out of our nonsense of all kinds, and made men of, instead of ghosts and phantoms. We are weary of gliding ghostlike through the world, which is itself so slight and unreal. We crave a sense of reality, though it comes in strokes of pain. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. — C. G. Jung

I HAVE A SECRET I CAN'T TELL NOR INK;
THOUGH IT HAS NO SCENT, IT DOES OFTEN STINK.
THOUGH IT MAKES NO SOUND, IT CAN MAKE YOU ROAR;
WHEN IT'S TASTELESS, I LIKE IT ALL THE MORE.
THOUGH IT HAS NO SHADE, IT LACKS NOT COLOR;
THOUGH IT HAS NO SHAPE, NO CAUSE FOR DOLOR.
IF YOU THINK YOU KNOW IT, YOU'RE INCORRECT,
AND FROM YOU THE SECRET I WILL PROTECT.
THE SECRET OF LIFE IS NOT STONE NOR CENTS,
FOR THE SECRET SENSE IS BUT A NONSENSE. — Pseudonymous Bosch

GUIL: I think I have it. A man talking sense to himself is no madder then a man talking nonsense not to himself.
ROS: Or just as mad.
GUIL: Or just as mad.
ROS: And he does both.
GUIL: So there you are.
ROS: Stark raving sane. — Tom Stoppard

We wanted something in which to believe, as many people on Earth once believed in demons, or in sunken lost continents, in a face on Mars, crop circles, visitations from being on other planets, or God, Buddha, Christ, Allah, and so on. The fact that all of the above were total nonsense didn't change the desire to believe that there was Something Else out there, something that could make sense of chaotic lives and events. — Stephen Leigh

Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless ... (They are of the same kind as the question whether the Good is more or less identical than the Beautiful.) — Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is our earth, not yours or mine or his. We are meant to live on it, helping each other, not destroying each other. This is not some romantic nonsense but the actual fact. But man has divided the earth, hoping thereby that in the particular he is going to find happiness, security, a sense of abiding comfort. Until a radical change takes place and we wipe out all nationalities, all ideologies, all religious divisions, and establish a global relationship - psychologically first, inwardly before organizing the outer - we shall go on with wars. If you harm others, if you kill others, whether in anger or by organized murder which is called war, you, who are the rest of humanity, not a separate human being fighting the rest of mankind, are destroying yourself. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Baruk looked up, then twisted in his chair to regard his guest, who was busy preening herself on his map-table. 'Crone, the inconsistencies in this text are infuriating.'
The Great Raven cocked her head, beak gaping for a moment in laughter, then said, 'So what? Show me a written history that makes sense, and I will show you true fiction. If that is all you want, then look elsewhere! My master concluded that Dillat's nonsense would make a fine gift for your collection. If you are truly displeased, there are plenty of other idiocies in his library, those that he bothered to extract from Moon's Spawn, that is. He left whole rooms crammed with the rubbish, you know.'
Baruk blinked slowly, struggling to keep his horror from his voice as he said, 'No, I did not know that.'
Undeceived, Crone cackled. Then she said, 'My master was most amused at the notion of falling to his knees and crying out to the Hundred Gods-'
'Thousand. The Thousand Gods.'
'Whatever. — Steven Erikson

He found himself smiling and talking politely to people who desired to show their respect and admiration for his uniform-instead of ignoring them and turning away. His sense of separation from and annoyance with these men and women who talked so glibly of war and who had not the faintest notion of what war was ebbed away; and he began to accept the fact that to chatter nonsense with neither knowledge nor perception was the ordinary manner of mankind. — Howard Fast

In other words, the problem of empire-building is essentially mystical. It must somehow foster the impression that a man is great in the degree that his nation is great; that a German as such is superior to a Belgian as such; an Englishman, to an Irishman; an American, to a Mexican: merely because the first-named countries are in each case more powerful than their comparatives. And people who have no individual stature whatever are willing to accept this poisonous nonsense because it gives them a sense of importance without the trouble of any personal effort. — Felix Morley

Netherling logic resides in the hazy border between sense and nonsense. — A.G. Howard

:The way to the Seaglass Stair will be long and arduous. There will be those who wish to stop you. They will kill you to keep you from succeeding.:
:Why? That's insane.:
:As if insanity were some fabrication, some dark tale Hemfra told you one night when you were a child and refused to sleep. There will always be resistance to anything and everything, defying all logic, all natural sense of self-preservation. There will be those who wish for you to simply let the world fade away. It is the way of humans to be illogical for the sake of personal conviction and made up nonsense.: — Ash Gray

Seeing him brought in, has, I think, saved me from losing my mind; for that I do not thank him-sanity, after all is only reason applied to human affairs, and when this reason, applied over years, has resulted in disaster, destruction, despair, misery, starvation, and rot, the mind is correct to abandon it. This decision to discard reason, I see now, is not the last but the first reasonable act; and this insanity we are taught to fear consists in nothing but responding naturally and instinctively rather than with the culturally acquired, mannered thing called reason; an insane man talks nonsense because like a bird or a cat he is too sensible to talk sense. — Gene Wolfe

My interest in this started one night when I was doing stand-up in a small club in New York. I was talking about texting and I asked for a volunteer who'd met someone recently and had been texting back and forth with them. I read the back-and-forth messages of one gentleman and made jokes about how we were all dealing with some version of this nonsense. I quickly noticed that one woman seemed very puzzled. I asked her why she looked so bewildered, and she explained that this was something that just didn't happen in France, where she was from. This kind of back-and-forth simply didn't exist, she claimed. I asked her, "Okay, well, what would a guy in France text you, if you met him at a bar?" She said, "He would write . . . 'Fancy a fuck?'" And I said, "Whoa. What would you write back?" She said, "I would write yes or no depending on whether I fancied one or not." I was stunned - that kind of makes so much more sense, right? — Aziz Ansari

Matthew knew that phrenology was nonsense, and yet, years later, he found himself making judgments similar to those made by his father; slippery people looked slippery; they really did. And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice - based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudiced and muddled folk wisdom - how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right! — Alexander McCall Smith

The sense of beauty puts a brake upon destruction, by representing its object as irreplaceable. When the world looks back at me with my eyes, as it does in aesthetic experience, it is also addressing me in another way. Something is being revealed to me, and I am being made to stand still and absorb it. It is of course nonsense to suggest that there are naiads in the trees and dryads in the groves. What is revealed to me in the experience of beauty is a fundamental truth about being - the truth that being is a gift, and receiving it is a task. This is a truth of theology that demands exposition as such. — Roger Scruton

Nonsense wakes up the brain cells. And it helps develop a sense of humor, which is awfully important in this day and age. Humor has a tremendous place in this sordid world. It's more than just a matter of laughing. If you can see things out of whack, then you can see how things can be in whack. — Dr. Seuss

I am interested in most mythology. Celtic or Christian no more than anything else. I will admit to a pleasure and sense of hope in what I see as the basic teachings of Christ, stripped of the nonsense that has sometimes been accumulated about them and the embarrassing misunderstanding. — Tanith Lee

The realization that reason and anti-reason, sense and nonsense, design and chance, consciousness and unconsciousness, belong together as necessary parts of a whole - this was the central message of Dada. — Hans Richter

Have you ever considered how much pure stuff and nonsense surrounds this subject of interior decoration? Probably not. Almost everyone believes that there is something deep and mysterious about it or that you have to know all sorts of complicated details about periods before you can lift a finger. Well, you don't. Decorating is just sheer fun: a delight in color, an awareness of balance, a feeling for lighting, a sense of style, a zest for life and an amused enjoyment of the smart accessories of the moment. — Dorothy Draper

Some authors write nonsense in a clear style, and others sense in an obscure one; some can reason without being able to persuade, others can persuade without being able to reason; some dive so deep that they descend into darkness, and others soar so high that they give us no light; and some, in a vain attempt to be cutting and dry, give us only that which is cut and dried. We should labor, therefore, to treat with ease of things that are difficult; with familiarity, of things that are novel; and with perspicuity, of things that are profound. — Charles Caleb Colton

A lot of what I do - I have to try and make sense of things before I can make nonsense of them. — Rory Bremner

I do not think that G. H. Hardy was talking nonsense when he insisted that the mathematician was discovering rather than creating ... The world for me is a necessary system, and in the degree to which the thinker can surrender his thought to that system and follow it, he is in a sense participating in that which is timeless or eternal. — Brand Blanshard

It is almost impossible to translate verbally and well at the same time; for the Latin (a most severe and compendious language) often expresses that in one word which either the barbarity or the narrowness of modern tongues cannot supply in more ... But since every language is so full of its own proprieties that what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay, sometimes nonsense, in another, it would be unreasonable to limit a translator to the narrow compass of his author's words; it is enough if he choose out some expression which does not vitiate the sense. — John Dryden

The language of categories is affectionately known as "abstract nonsense," so named by Norman Steenrod. This term is essentially accurate and not necessarily derogatory: categories refer to "nonsense" in the sense that they are all about the "structure," and not about the "meaning," of what they represent. — Paolo Aluffi

We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will talk sense to the American people. But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense. And the notion that this Nation is headed for defeat through deficit, or that strength is but a matter of slogans, is nothing but just plain nonsense. — John F. Kennedy

Faeries are not fantasy, but a connection to reality. Faeries are irrational, poetic, absurd, and very, very wise. Faeries say there is nonsense in dogma, and sense in nonsense. Faeries express themselves with high seriousness and low humour. Faeries are resistant to all definitions. — Brian Froud

Literature has her quacks no less than medicine, and they are divided into two classes; those who have erudition without genius, and those who have volubility without depth; we shall get second-hand sense from the one, and original nonsense from the other. — Charles Caleb Colton

For one day as I leant over a gate that led into a field, the rhythm stopped: the rhymes and the hummings, the nonsense and the poetry. A space was cleared in my mind. I saw through the thick leaves of habit. Leaning over the gate I regretted so much litter, so much unaccomplishment and separation, for one cannot cross London to see a friend, life being so full of engagements; nor take a ship to India and see a naked man spearing a fish in blue water. I said life had been imperfect, an unfinished phrase. It had been impossible for me, taking snuff as I do from any bagman met in a train, to keep coherency - that sense of the generations, of women carrying red pitchers to the Nile, of the nightingale who sings among conquests and migrations. It had been too vast an undertaking, I said, and how can I go on lifting my foot perpetually to climb the stair? I addressed myself as one would speak to a companion with whom one is voyaging to the North Pole. — Virginia Woolf

Any such inklings were like a few scattered grains of truth dissolved in an ocean of nonsense, and were anyway generally inextricably bound up with patently paranoid ravings which served only to devalue the small amounts of sense and pertinence with which they were associated. — Iain Banks

This stood for the Evolution of Sense, his greatest course (with an enrollment of twelve, none even remotely apostolic) which had opened and would close with the phrase destined to be overquoted one day: The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense. — Vladimir Nabokov

I, too, lived - which I had not done before, and which I could still do. I lived into the depths, and the depths began to speak. The depths taught me the other truth. It thus united sense and nonsense in me. I had to recognize that I am only the expression and symbol of the soul. In the sense of the spirit of the depths, I am as I am in this visible world a symbol of my soul, and I am thoroughly a serf, completely subjugated, utterly obedient. The spirit of the depths taught me to say: "I am the servant of a child." Through this dictum I learn above all the most extreme humility, as what I most need. — C. G. Jung

[Obituary of atheist philosopher Richard Robinson]
An Atheist's Values is one of the best short accounts of liberalism (a term Robinson accepted) and humanism (a term he ignored) produced during the present century, all the more powerful for its lucidity and moderation, its wit and wisdom. It may now seem old-fashioned, but during those confused alarms of struggle and fight between the ignorant armies of left and right, thousands of readers must have taken inspiration from Richard Robinson's rational defence of rationalism.
It is a pity that it is now out of print, when there is still so much nonsense and so little sense in the world. — Nicolas Walter

I know you do; and it is that which makes the wonder. With your good sense, to be so honestly blind to the follies and nonsense of others! Affectation of candour is common enough - one meets with it everywhere. But to be candid without ostentation or design - to take the good of everybody's character and make it still better, and say nothing of the bad - belongs to you alone. And so you like this man's sisters, too, do you? Their manners are not equal to his. — Jane Austen

Those who imagined, in 1989, that never again would an intellectual be caught defending the Leninist Party, or advocating the methods of Josef Stalin, had reckoned without the overwhelming power of nonsense. In the urgent need to believe, to find a central mystery that is the true meaning of things and to which one's life can be dedicated, nonsense is much to be preferred to sense. For it builds a way of life around something that cannot be questioned. No reasoned assault is possible against that which denies the possibility of a reasoned assault. — Roger Scruton

Chiropractic, which celebrated its centennial in 1995, is a curious mixture of science and pseudoscience, sense and nonsense. Much of it is based on the theory that misaligned spinal bones produce nerve interference that causes disease. Many chiropractors claim that correcting these misalignments ("subluxations") can restore health and that regular spinal adjustments are essential to maintain it. — Samuel Homola

Once you have the cap and gown all you need do is open your mouth. Whatever nonsense you talk becomes wisdom and all the rubbish good sense. — Moliere

At that time I was too young for some of the troubles I was having, and I had not yet learned what to do with them. It no longer can matter what kind of troubles they were, or what finally became of them, though all my tradition, background, and training had taught me unanswerably that no one except a coward ever runs away from anything. What nonsense! They should have taught me the difference between courage and foolhardiness, instead of leaving me to find it out for myself. I learned finally that if I still had the sense I was born with, I would take off like a deer at the first warning of certain dangers. — Katherine Anne Porter

All this emphasis on youth - I don't buy it. Listen, I know what a misery being young can be, so don't tell me it's so great. All these kids who came to me with their struggles, their strife, their feelings of inadequacy, their sense that life was miserable, so bad they wanted to kill themselves ... and in addition to all the miseries, the young are not wise. They have very little understanding about life. Who wants to live everyday when you don't know what's going on? When people are manipulating you, telling you to buy this perfume and you'll be beautiful, or this pair of jeans and you'll be sexy - and you believe them! It's such nonsense. — Morrie Schwartz.

Just as the highest and the lowest notes are equally inaudible, so perhaps, is the greatest sense and the greatest nonsense equally unintelligible. — Allan Watts

The time must come inevitably when mankind shall surmount the imbecility of religion, as it has surmounted the imbecility of religion's ally, magic. It is impossible to imagine this world being really civilized so long as so much nonsense survives. In even its highest forms religion embraces concepts that run counter to all common sense. It can be defended only by making assumptions and adopting rules of logic that are never heard of in any other field of human thinking. — H.L. Mencken

Many people under the influence of science, and particularly neuro-nonsense, will say the sacred is an old concept, it's just a hangover, but you can easily see that's not so, because everyone has a sense of desecration: there are things everybody values which, when they are spoiled are not just moved or destroyed, they are desecrated. Something that is vital not just to you but the world. People have this sense when they see their towns pulled apart and concrete blocks put in the middle of them. You only have to look at Aberdeen to see what happens to a beautiful place when the desecrators get their hands on it. — Roger Scruton

Some say that my teaching is nonsense.
Other call it lofty but impractical.
But to those who have looked inside themselves,
this nonsense makes perfect sense.
And to those who put it into practice,
this loftiness has roots that go deep. — Lao-Tzu

Love is not the expression of words and really you no need to show that when you act for them your sudden unconditional decision, work, non-sense, care shows everything ... that make them special one of your world ... Bharat Bhushan — Bharat

Does a man of sense run after every silly tale of hobgoblins or fairies, and canvass particularly the evidence? I never knew anyone, that examined and deliberated about nonsense who did not believe it before the end of his enquiries. — David Hume

Perhaps there is more sense in our nonsense and more nonsense in our 'sense' than we would care to believe. — David Bohm

I've become addicted to playing poker because you're constantly faced with confusion, and winning is trying to make sense out of nonsense. — Jason Calacanis

He was not only the most brilliant strategist of all our generals, but he had a good political sense. A man of that quality was too difficult for Hitler to swallow for long. At conferences Manstein often differed from Hitler, in front of others, and would go so far as to declare that some of the ideas which Hitler put forward were nonsense. — Erich Von Manstein

You have but to hold forth in cap and gown, and any gibberish becomes learning, all nonsense passes for sense. — Moliere

She wore tight corsets to give her a teeny waist - I helped her lace them up - but they had the effect of causing her to faint. Mom called it the vapors and said it was a sign of her high breeding and delicate nature. I thought it was a sign that the corset made it hard to breathe. — Jeannette Walls

If you can master nonsense as well as you have already learned to master sense, then each will expose the other for what it is: absurdity. From that moment of illumination, a man begins to be free regardless of his surroundings. He becomes free to play order games and change them at will. He becomes free to play disorder games just for the hell of it. He becomes free to play neither or both. And as the master of his own games, he plays without fear, and therefore without frustration, and therefore with good will in his soul and love in his being. — Malaclypse The Younger

Perhaps we don't always discriminate between sense and nonsense. — George Eliot

That is the bitterness of art: you see a good effect, and some nonsense about sense continually intervenes. — Robert Louis Stevenson

The spirit of the depths took my understanding and all my knowledge and placed them at the service of the inexplicable and the paradoxical. He robbed me of speech and writing for everything that was not in his service, namely the melting together of sense and nonsense, which produces the supreme meaning. — C. G. Jung

Doeg, though without knowing how or why,
Made still a blundering kind of melody;
Spurr'd boldly on, and dash'd through thick and thin,
Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in;
Free from all meaning whether good or bad,
And in one word, heroically mad. — John Dryden

Do all those words mean the same thing?" gasped Milo. "Of course." "Certainly." "Precisely." "Exactly." "Yes," they replied in order. "Well, then," said Milo, not understanding why each one said the same thing in a slightly different way, "wouldn't it be simpler to use just one? It would certainly make more sense." "Nonsense." "Ridiculous." "Fantastic." "Absurd." "Bosh," they chorused again, and continued. "We're not interested in making sense; it's not our job," scolded the first. "Besides," explained the second, "one word is as good as another - so why not use them all? — Norton Juster

I am sure the man who powders most, perfumes most, embroiders most, and talks most nonsense, is most admired. Though to be candid, there are some who have too much good sense to esteem such monkey-like animals as these, in whose formation, as the saying is, the tailors and barbers go halves with God Almighty. — Thomas Jefferson

Lovers, it is well known, carry the art of tautology to its utmost perfection, and even the most impatient of them can both bear to hear and repeat the same things times without number, till the sound becomes the echo to the sense or the nonsense previously uttered. — Susan Edmonstone Ferrier

There are realms of life where the concepts of sense and nonsense do not apply. — Gregory Galloway

The Dutchman [Brannenburg] was hard ... he was stone. His brain was eroded granite where the few ideas he had carved deep their ruts of opinion. There was no way for another idea to seep in, no place for imagination, no place for dreams, none for compassion or mercy or even fear.
He knew no shadings of emotion, he knew no half-rights or half-wrongs or pity or excuse, nor had he any sense of pardon. The more I thought of him the more I knew he was not evil in himself, and he would have been shocked that anybody thought of him as evil. Shocked for a moment only, then he'd have shut the idea from his mind as nonsense. For the deepest groove worn into that granite brain was the one of his own rightness.
And that scared me. — Louis L'Amour

School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not. — H.L. Mencken

The young look up to me as their feeder," said Alex. "Well, they can go look for another trough. I'm through with this hogwash."
"Are liberal ideas hogwash?"
"All ideas are hogwash, Jack."
"Don't you believe in anything anymore?"
"Sure. I believe in God the Father of Nonsense, creator of Crap and Nonsense, is now and ever shall be Crap without end. Oh, oh, Jack, how we break our hearts trying to make sense of a world that's pure and utter crap. But if you ever come to where I am now, you'll be surprised and delighted to find out how little anything matters."
"You've begun to sound Christian," said Pocholo. — Nick Joaquin

Ivanov: With a heavy head, with a slothful spirit, exhausted, overstretched, broken, without faith, without love, without a goal, I roam like a shadow among men and I don't know who I am, why I'm alive, what I want. And I now think that love is nonsense, that embraces are cloying, that there's no sense in work, that song and passionate speeches are vulgar and outmoded. And everywhere I take with me depression, chill boredom, dissatisfaction, revulsion from life ... I am destroyed, irretrievably! — Anton Chekhov

Nonsense, when earnest, is impressive, and sometimes takes you in. If you are in a hurry, you occasionally mistake it for sense. — Benjamin Disraeli

A lot of the fun lies in trying to penetrate the mystery; and this is best done by saying over the lines to yourself again and again, till they pass through the stage of sounding like nonsense, and finally return to a full sense that had at first escaped notice. — Anthony Hecht

People will often, almost always, prefer a male God. A male image of God gives them this sense of security, safety, order, no nonsense. So that's where their psyche is at. Probably it's something that they've got to go through. Not that there isn't a need for order in the world, but the mystical level seems to be the mature level of religion, and there the question is not order but union - divine union. And so, without some integration of the feminine, usually you never get to the mystical level. — Richard Rohr

Thus it was, that when the little hairy man arrived back from the village of Revelry (although why it was so called no man alive could say, for it was a gloomy, somber place, and had been for time out of mind) he found Tristran sitting glumly beside a hawthorn bush, wrapped in a blanket, and bewailing the loss of his hat. "They said cruel things about my true love," said Tristran. "Miss Victoria Forester. How dare they?" "The little folk dare anything," said his friend. "And they talks a lot of nonsense. But they talks an awful lot of sense, as well. You listen to 'em at your peril, and you ignore 'em at your peril, too. — Neil Gaiman

Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves. — Lewis Carroll

See human nonsense as nonsense and save years of trying to make sense out of it. — Vernon Howard

We do not base botany upon the old-fashioned division into useful and useless plants, or our zoology upon the naive distinction between harmless and dangerous animals. But we still complacently assume that consciousness is sense and the unconsciousness is nonsense. In science such an assumption would be laughed out of court. Do microbes, for instance, make sense or nonsense?
Whatever the unconscious may be, it is a natural phenomenon producing symbols that prove to be meaningful. We cannot expect someone who has never looked through a microscope to be an authority on microbes; in the same way, no one who has not made a serious study of natural symbols can be considered a competent judge in this matter. But the general undervaluation of the human soul is so great that neither the great religions nor the philosophies nor scientific rationalism have been willing to look at it twice. — C. G. Jung