The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble…. They can never be solved, but only outgrown…. This ‘outgrowing’, as I formerly called it, on further experience was seen to consist in a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person’s horizon, and through this widening of view, the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life-tendency.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

The greatest and most important problems of life cannot be solved. They can
only be outgrown.

The serious problems in life...are never fully solved. If ever they should appear to be so it is a sure sign that something has been lost. The meaning and purpose of a problem seem to lie not in its solution but in our working at it incessantly.

His very existence was improbable, inexplicable, and altogether bewildering. He was an insoluble problem. It was inconceivable how he had existed, how he had succeeded in getting so far, how he had managed to remain — why he did not instantly disappear.

Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way, like the problem of cause and effect. Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together.

All problems are unsolvable. The essence of the existence of a problem is that there is no solution. Looking for a fact means there is no fact. To think is not to know how to be.

This is the situation of everyone who feels that life is a problem to be solved. Whether you seek to solve that problem through psychoanalysis, integration, salvation, or buddhahood, you define yourself in a certain way when you see life as a problem to be solved.

It is in the whole process of meeting and solving problems that life has meaning. Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure. Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed, they create our courage and our wisdom. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually. It is through the pain of confronting and resolving problems that we learn.

Man's potentialities are still more important, infinitely more important, than all his present achievements. This was so at the beginning and it still holds. His greatest problem has been how to selectively organize and consciously direct both the internal and external agents of the mind, so that they form more coherent and more intelligible wholes. Technics played a constructive part in solving this problem; but instruments of stone and wood and fiber could not be put to work on a sufficient scale until man had succeeded in inventing other impalpable tools wrought out of the very stuff of his own body, and not visible in any other form.

The greatest problem of human life is fear. It is fear that robs us of
happiness. It is fear that causes us to settle for far less than we are
capable of. It is fear that is the root cause of negative emotions,
unhappiness and problems in human relationships.

Original: Todos os problemas são insolúveis. A essência de haver um problema é não haver solução. Procurar um facto significa não haver um facto. Pensar é não saber existir.

Without difficulties, life would be like a stream without rocks and curves - about as interesting as concrete. Without problems, there can be no personal growth, no group achievement, no progress for humanity. But what matters about problems is what one does with them. Eeyores don't overcome problems. No, it's the other way around.

There are problems to whose solution I would attach an infinitely greater importance than to those of mathematics, for example touching ethics, or our relation to God, or concerning our destiny and our future; but their solution lies wholly beyond us and completely outside the province of science.