Psychological Duality Quotes

Pain may be said to follow pleasure as its shadow.

You have an evil twin who is always with you. He is called your ego.

Maybe mom is my alter ego and the woman I'm able to be when I'm working.

As Carl Jung put it, "In each of us there is another whom we do not know." As Pink Floyd sang, "There's someone in my head, but it's not me."

I like to think that good people win. But even good people have other sides. Most people will slow down to get a good look at an accident, even though they won't admit it.

In sum, doubling is the psychological means by which one invokes the evil potential of the self. That evil is neither inherent in the self nor foreign to it. To live out the doubling and call forth the evil is a moral choice for which one is responsible, whatever the level of consciousness involved.

Just as words have two functions - information and creation - so each human mind has two personalities, one on the surface, one deeper down. The upper personality... is conscious and alert... The lower personality is a... perfect fool, but without it there is no literature.

Every fear hides a wish.

His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousands and thousands.

Insight into the two selves within a man clears up many confusions and contradictions. It was our understanding that preceded our victory.

How can both Nics, the loving and considerate and generous one, and the self-obsessed and self-destructive one, be the same person?

Jekyll is quite close to me, a little bit more shy. Whereas Hyde is a mish-mash of lots of things. I didn't realise I was borrowing it throughout the auditions - but Heath Ledger's Joker was an influence.

How else could it have occurred to man to divide the cosmos, on the analogy of day and night, summer and winter, into a bright day-world and a dark night-world peopled with fabulous monsters, unless he had the prototype of such a division in himself, in the polarity between the conscious and the invisible and unknowable unconscious?

Hopefully the person I'm trying to create is just a funny, dour, evil side of myself that has no other way to express itself. I don't model it after anyone in particular. Who would be like that? Who? I wouldn't want to meet that person. I wouldn't want to be interviewed by that person, I can tell you that.

In the case of complex personalities the matter stands thus: one of these can understand other men better than they can understand themselves, because within himself he has not only the character he is grasping, but also its opposite. Duality is necessary for observation and comprehension.

The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful. In some strange way, I have tried to do that with manic-depressive illness. It has been a fascinating, albeit deadly, enemy and companion; I have found it to be seductively complicated, a distillation both of what is finest in our natures, and of what is most dangerous.

We all have monsters inside of us, and we all have an inner child in us. You always think about your inner child as being the sweet and innocent part of yourself, but it's also the part that's all ego with the mentality of, "If the world isn't pleasing me, it isn't doing its job."

The devil personifies not the nature that is around us but the nature that is within us- the infinitely ferocious and cunning prehuman creature that is still within us, sealed in the subconscious cellars of the psyche.

I've always been interested in the intersection between our rational and our unconscious lives.

Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint.

The most paradoxical aspect of neurotic shame is that it is the core motivator of the superachieved and the underachieved, the star and the scapegoat, the righteous and the wretched, the powerful and the pathetic.

The magic will which makes us see the other side of our natures-dream and disaster, catastrophe and fulfillment-is the great permanent challenge of humanity.

Every day I am someone else. I am myself-I know I am myself-but I am also someone else. It has always been like this.

The thing I've discovered that is a help is that there isn't a simple virtue or a simple vice. They're always connected. If you have Tendency A, that you loathe, you can almost be sure that Tendency B, which you love, is somehow connected to it.

[ John F.Kennedy's friend] Chuck Spalding at the wedding said Jack was two guys: the groom and somebody else observing from a distance. ... It must have been maddening to be married to a guy like that, but you could at the same time argue that characteristic kept the world from being blown up.