He Quotes

“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, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology

“Generally, a mood will run its course in an inteligent man; if a woman doesn't puncture it prematurely, the man will puncture it himself. He will regain his senses somewhere along the way; he will say, "Now wait, we had better think about this." That is, if his wife hasn't said five minutes before, "Now, dear, don't you think we had better think about this?" Because then he won't, of course.

If a woman is needling, it is doubly hard for a man to come out of a mood. That intensifies it. A man is really in a kind of travail when he is in a mood. He needs help, not needling, but feminine help. He probably won't thank you for it, but inside he will be awfully grateful.

When a woman has to deal with a man in a mood, she generally does the wrong thing. She generally gets her animus out, that nasty thing, and says, "Now, look, this is utter nonsense, stop it. We don't need any more fishline leader."

That is just throwing gasoline on the fire. There will be an anima-animus exchange, and all will be lost. The two are in the right hand and in the left hand of the goddess Maya, and you might as well give up for the afternoon.

There is, however, a point of genius that a woman can bring forth if she is capable of it and willing to do it. If she will become more feminine than the mood attacking the man , she can dispel it for him. But this is a very, very difficult thing for a woman to do. Her automatic response is to let out the sword of the animus and start hacking away. But if a woman can be patient with a man and not critical, but represent for him a true feminine quality, then, as soon as his sanity is sufficiently back for him to comprehend such subtleties, he will likely come out of his mood.

A wife can help a great deal if she will function from her feminine side in this way. She has to have a mature feminity to do this, a femininity that is strong enough to stand in the face of this spurious femininity the man is producing.”
― Robert A. Johnson, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology

“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, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology

“All psychological suffering (or happiness, taken in its usual sense) is a matter of comparison.”
― Robert A. Johnson, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology

“Someone observed darkly that it is always two A.M. when one is in the 'dark night of the soul.”
― Robert A. Johnson, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology

“Our story begins with the Grail castle, which is in serious trouble. The Fisher King, the king of the castle, has been wounded. His wounds are so severe that he cannot live, yet he is incapable of dying. He groans; he cries out; he suffers constantly. The whole land is in desolation, for a land mirrors the condition of its king, inwardly in a mythological dimension, as well as outwardly in the physical world. The cattle do not reproduce; the crops won’t grow; knights are killed; children are orphaned; maidens weep; there is mourning everywhere—all because the Fisher King is wounded.”
― Robert A. Johnson, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology

“No son ever develops into manhood without, in some way, being disloyal to his mother. If he remains with her, to comfort her and console her, then he never gets out of his mother complex. Often a mother will do all she can to keep her son with her. One of the most subtle ways is to encourage him the idea of being loyal to her; but if he gives in to her completely then she often finds herself with a son severely injured in his masculinity.

The son must ride off and leave his mother, even if it appears to mean disloyalty, and the mother must bear this pain. Later, like Parsifal, the son may come back to the mother and they may find a new relationship, on a new level; but this can only be done after the son has first achieved his independence and transferred his affection to a woman, either in an interior way with his own inner feminine side or in an exterior way with a real female companion of his own age.

In our myth, Parsifal's mother died when he left. Perhaps she represents the kind of woman who can only exist as a mother, who dies when this role is taken from her because she does not understand how to be an individual woman, but only a "mother.”
― Robert A. Johnson, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology

“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, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology

“The 6 feminine elements in a man are:

His human mother. This is the actual woman who was his mother, she with all her idiosyncrasies, individual characteristics, and uniqueness.

His mother complex. This resided entirely inside the man himself. This is his regressive capacity which would like to return to a dependency on his mother and be a child a gain. This is a man's wish to fail, his defeatist capacity, his subterranean fascination with death or accident, his demand to be take care of. This is pure poison in a man's psychology.

His mother archetype. If the mother complex is pure poison, the mother archetype is pure gold. It is the feminine half of God, the cornucopia of the universe, mother nature, the bounty which is freely poured out to us without fail. We could not live for one minute without the bounty of the mother archetype. It is always reliable, nourishing, sustaining.

His fair maiden. This is the feminine component in every man's psychic structure and is the fair damsel. It's is Blanche Fleur, one's lady fair, Dulcinea in Don Quixote, Beatrice to Dante in the Comedia Divina. It is she who gives meaning and color to one's life. Dr. Jung named this quality anima, she who animates and brings life.

His wife or partner. This is the flesh and blood companion who share his life journey and is a human companion.

Sophia. This is the Goddess of Wisdom, the feminine half of God, the Shekinah in Jewish mysticism. It comes as a shock to a man to discover that Wisdom is feminine, but all mythologies have portrayed it so. 49-50”
― Robert A. Johnson, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology

“Creativity in a man is directly linked with his inner feminine capacity for growth and creation. Genius in a man is his interior feminine capacity to give birth; it is his masculinity which gives him capacity for putting that creativity into form and structure in the outer world.”
― Robert A. Johnson, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology

“A Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, came to America more than a century ago and made some astute observations about the American way. He said that we have a misleading idea at the very head of our Constitution: the pursuit of happiness. One can not pursue happiness; if he does he obscures it. If he will proceed with the human task of life, the relocation of the center of gravity of the personality to something greater outside itself, happiness will be the outcome.”
― Robert A. Johnson, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology

“A surgeon friend of mine likes to say, "Don't fix what isn't broken." It is only an extension of that to say, "Don't search for that which is already at hand." But we are westerners and have to search in order to learn that there is no search.”
― Robert A. Johnson, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology

“A medieval Christian proverb says, "To search for God is to insult God." This implies that God is always present and any search for him is a refusal of this fact.”
― Robert A. Johnson, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology

“Being overwhelmed by something other than one's true self. This is weakness and incompetence in a man.”
― Robert A. Johnson, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology

“Feeling is the ability to value: mood is being overtaken or possessed by the inner feminine. To feel is the sublime art of having a value structure and a sense of meaning—where one belongs, where one’s allegiance is, where one’s roots are. To mood (we are already in difficulty since there is no adequate term for being caught up in a mood) is to be in the grips of the feminine part of our nature, to be overwhelmed by an irrational element that plays havoc with a man’s outer life. The feminine side of a man is to connect him within the depths of his inner being and to make a bridge to his deepest self.”
― Robert A. Johnson, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology

“I doubt if there is a woman in the world who has not had to mutely stand by as she watched a man agonize over his Fisher King aspect. She may be the one who notices, even before the man himself is aware of it, that there is suffering and a haunting sense of injury and incompleteness in him. A man suffering in this way is often driven to do idiotic things to cure the wound and ease the desperation he feels. Usually he seeks an unconscious solution outside of himself, complaining about his work, his marriage, or his place in the world.”
― Robert A. Johnson, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology

“The current fascination with Asian religions is a direct Grail quest. The Asia never fractured as we westerners did, and they never divided the secular and sacred worlds so tragically as we did. No traditional Asian ever strays far from the Grail castle.
Asian teachers look at us and say, "What in the world is this great hurry and hunger in you people?" Someone spoke of us as "those aryan birds of prey." A people in the grips of so urgent a quest are indeed formidable.”
― Robert A. Johnson George A. Ruffner, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology

“The current fascination with Asian religions is a direct Grail quest. The Asia never fractured as we westerners did, and they never divided the secular and sacred worlds so tragically as we did. No traditional Asian ever strays far from the Grail castle.
Asian teachers look at us and say, "What in the world is this great hurry and hunger in you people?" Someone spoke of us as "those aryan birds of prey." A people in the grips of so urgent a quest are indeed formidable.”
― Robert A. Johnson, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology

“mythology describes the hero's battle with his internal self as the encounter with the dragon, and modern man has no fewer dragon battles than did his medieval counterpart”
― Robert A. Johnson, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology

“this surely is the worst deprivation of all: to be barred from the essence of beauty and holiness when just those qualities are right in front of you is the cruelest of all suffering”
― Robert A. Johnson, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology