Carl Jung on Yourself – Anthology
Selfish desire ultimately desires itself. You find yourself in your desire, so do not say that desire is vain. If you desire yourself you produce the divine son in your embrace with yourself. Your desire is the father of the God, your self is the mother of the God, but the son is the new God, your master. Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 245.
But the spirit of the depths said: “No one can or should halt sacrifice. Sacrifice is not destruction; sacrifice is the foundation stone of what is to come. Have you not had monasteries? Have not countless thousands gone into the desert? You should carry the monastery in yourself. The desert is within you. Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 230.
When the flame of your greed consumes you, and nothing remains of you but ash, so nothing of you was steadfast. Yet the flame in which you consumed yourself has illuminated many. But if you flee from your fire full of fear, you scorch your fellow men, and the burning torment of your greed cannot die out, so long as you do not desire yourself. Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 311.
The solitary went into the desert to find himself. But he did not want to find himself but rather the manifold meaning of holy scripture. You can suck the immensity of the small and the great into yourself and you will become emptier and emptier, since immense fullness and immense emptiness are one and the same. Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 273.
Remember that you can know yourself and with that you know enough. But you cannot know others and ev- erything else. Beware of knowing what lies beyond yourself or else your presumed knowledge will suffocate the life of those who know themselves. A knower may know himself. That is his limit. Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 306.
True joy is simple: it comes and exists from itself and is not to be sought here and there. At the risk of en- countering black night, you must devote yourself to me and seek no joy. Joy can never ever be prepared, but exists of its own accord or exists not at all. All you must do is fulfill your task nothing else. Joy comes from fulfillment, but not from longing. Philemon to Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 341
And you, my soul, I found again, first in images within men and then you yourself I found you where I least ex- pected you. You climbed out of a dark shaft. You announced yourself to me in advance in dreams. Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 233.
Break the Christ in yourself so that you may arrive at yourself and ultimately at your animal which is well-behaved in its herd and unwilling to infringe its laws. Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 296.
You should always ask yourself what you desire, since all too many do not know what they want. Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 249, Footnote 190.
This is how madness begins, this is madness … You cannot get conscious of these unconscious facts without giving yourself to them. If you can overcome your fear of the unconscious and can let yourself go down, then these facts take on a life of their own. Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 253. Footnote 211.
In this deification mystery you make yourself into the vessel, and are a vessel of creation in which the opposites reconcile. Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 253. Footnote 211.
Whoever reverses this word and others that I speak, is a player, since he doesn’t respect the spoken word. Know that you attain yourself from what you read in a book. You read as much into a book as out of it. Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Draft Footnote 145, Page 244.
My God, I love you as a mother loves the unborn whom she carries in her heart. Grow in the egg of the East, nourish yourself from my love, drink the juice of my life so that you will become a radiant God. We need your light, oh child. Since we go in darkness, light up our paths. May your light shine before us, may your fire warm the coldness of our life. We do not need your power but life. Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 286.
You can offer no more precious a sacrificial meal to your God than yourself. Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 310.
No one besides you has your God. He is always with you, yet you see him in others, and thus he is never with you. You strive to draw to yourself those who seem to possess your God. You will come to see that they do not possess him, and that you alone have him. Thus you are alone among men-in the crowd and yet alone. Solitude in multitude-ponder this. Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 329.
You announced yourself to me in advance in dreams. They burned in my heart and drove me to all the bold- est acts of daring, and forced me to rise above myself. You let me see truths of which I had no previous inkling. You let me undertake journeys, whose endless length would have scared me, if the knowledge of them had not been secure in you. Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 233.
What is meant is, that you should be with yourself, not alone but with yourself, and you can be with yourself even in a crowd. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1484.
To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were em- bracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1473.
Therefore my formula: for the love of mankind and for the love of yourself-of mankind in yourself-create a devil. That is an act of devotion, I should say; you have to put something where there is nothing, for the sake of mankind. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1322.
You see, in the actual functioning of the psyche, it does not matter whether you do a thing or whether it hap- pens to you; whether it reaches you from without or happens within, fate moves through yourself and outside circumstances equally. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 896.
You can never come to your self by building a meditation hut on top of Mount Everest; you will only be visited by your own ghosts and that is not individuation: you are all alone with yourself and the self doesn’t exist. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 805.
Our unconscious is surely located in the body, and you mustn’t think this a contradiction to the statement I usually make, that the collective unconscious is everywhere; for if you could put yourself into your sympathetic system, you would know what sympathy is-you would understand why the nervous system is called sympathetic. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 749-751.
Go and preach Christ to yourself: You being to preach to yourself-you are the very first. For the man who wants to preach is one who wants to run away from his own problem by converting other people. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 254.
The ego wants explanation always in order to assert its existence…Try to live without the ego. Whatever must come to you, will come. Don’t worry! …Don’t allow yourself to be led astray by the ravings of the animus…He will try every stunt to get you out of the realization of stillness, which is truly the Self. Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1; Page 427.
Whatever happens in the fantasy must happen to you. You should not let yourself be represented by a fan- tasy figure. You must safeguard the ego and only let it be modified by the unconscious, just as the latter must be acknowledged with full justification and only prevented from suppressing and assimilating the ego. Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Page 561
You can’t protect your anima by Yoga exercises which only procure a conscious thrill, but you can protect her by catching the unconscious contents that well up from the depths of yourself. Carl Jung; Letters Volume 1, Page 97.
If you succeed in remembering yourself, if you succeed in making a difference between yourself and that out- burst of passion, then you discover the self; you begin to individuate. Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Pages 39-40.
If the projected conflict is to be healed, it must return into the psyche of the individual, where it had its un- conscious beginnings. He must celebrate a Last Supper with himself, and eat his own flesh and drink his own blood; which means that he must recognize and accept the other in himself. . . . Is this perhaps the meaning of Christ’s teaching, that each must bear his own cross? For if you have to endure yourself, how will you be able to rend others also? Carl Jung; Mysterium Coniunctionis
You are light and life, like God the Father of whom Man was born. If therefore you learn to know yourself… you will return to life. Corpus Hermeticum I, Poimandres, 21.
Whenever we touch nature we get clean. People who have got dirty through too much civilization take a walk in the woods or a bath in the sea. They shake off the fetters and allow nature to touch them. It can be done within or without. Walking in the woods or laying on the grass, taking a bath in the sea are from the outside entering the unconscious, entering yourself through dreams is touching nature from the inside and this is the same thing, things
are put right again. Carl Jung, Dream Analysis; Notes on a Lecture given 1928-1930.
Whenever we touch nature we get clean. People who have got dirty through too much civilization take a walk in the woods or a bath in the sea. They shake off the fetters and allow nature to touch them. It can be done within or without. Walking in the woods or laying on the grass, taking a bath in the sea are from the outside entering the unconscious, entering yourself through dreams is touching nature from the inside and this is the same thing, things are put right again. Carl Jung, Dream Analysis; Notes on a Lecture given 1928-1930.
It will be good for your humility if you can accept the gifts of the unconscious guide that dwells in yourself, and it is good for your pride to humiliate itself to such an extent that you can accept what you receive. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 458-459.
Did you never ask yourself who my analyst is? Yet, when it comes to the last issue, we must be able to stand alone vis a vis the unconscious for better or worse. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 458-459.
I think that if you immerse yourself in my thought-processes without regarding them as a new gospel, a light will gradually go up for you about the nature of psychotherapy. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 455-456.
You yourself are a conflict that rages in itself and against itself, in order to melt its incompatible substances, the male and the female, in the fire of suffering, and thus create that fixed and unalterable form which is the goal of life. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 375.
Freud found out that neurotics must be regarded as individuals. He also realized that as an explorer he had to be able to be subjective, for you can only induce the patient to declare his standpoint when you can tell him what you yourself think of him. Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. 1, Page 66.
Begin with yourself, see whether your own gun is rusty before you declare war on other people. Alfred Adler cited in Modern Psychology, Vol. 2, Page 155.
You must step into the fantasy yourself and compel the figures to give you an answer. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 561.
You barricade yourself from the world with exaggerated saviour fantasies. So climb down from the mountain of your humility and follow your nose. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 559.
But you, just as naively, have intruded yourself as an Anima figure into this witches’ Sabbath and are there- fore caught up in the dance as though you were nothing but an Anima. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 334-335.
You must go in quest of yourself, and you will find yourself again only in the simple and forgotten things. Why not go into the forest for a time, literally? Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books… Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 479.
You can protect your anima by Yoga exercises which only procure a conscious thrill, but you can protect her by catching the unconscious contents that well up from the depths of yourself. Try to see your fantasies are, no matter how disreputable they seem to be; that is your blackness, your shadow that ought to be swallowed. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 95-97.
It is very important for your mental health that you should on the one hand concern yourself with psychic ma- terial but on the other hand should do so as systematically and accurately as possible, other-wise you are running a dangerous risk. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 528-529.
You cannot be a good Christian and redeem yourself, nor can you be a Buddha and worship God. It is much better to accept the conflict, for it admits only of an irrational solution, if any. Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 483.
One’s anxiety always points out our task. If you escape it you have lost a piece of yourself, and a most prob- lematic piece at that, with which the Creator of things was going to experiment in His unforeseeable ways. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 516-517.
If you learn about yourself and if eventually you discover more or less who you are, you also learn about God, and who He is. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 301.
The levitation of St. Francis is a typical example. You can see yourself from a foot above, from the ceiling or from the ground. The Yogin himself levitates because he is so identified with his contemplation that he loses the weight of his body. Carl Jung, ETH Lecture III, 17May 1935, Pages 210.
Do not allow yourself to go gray over missing my 60th birthday. The abstract number 60 means nothing at all to me. I much prefer to know, through hearing from you, what you are doing. What the European Jews are doing I al- ready know, but what the Jews are doing on archetypal soil—that interests me extraordinarily. Carl Jung, 22Dec1935.
As Dorn says, you will never make the One unless you become one yourself. Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 753.
But if you recognize your own involvement you yourself must enter into the process with your personal reac- tions, just as if you were one of the fantasy figures, or rather, as if the drama being enacted before your eyes were real. Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 753.
Did you never ask yourself who my analyst is? Yet, when it comes to the last issue, we must be able to stand alone vis a vis the unconscious for better or worse. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 458-459.
There is no point in delivering yourself over to the last drop. . . . In my view it is absolutely essential always to have our consciousness well enough in hand to pay sufficient attention to our reality, to the Here and Now. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 239.
When you observe the world, you see people; you see houses; you see the sky; you see tangible objects. But when you observe yourself within, you see moving images, a world of images generally known as fantasies. Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 22.
They belong to you, and you have painted them as a support for your own individuation process. They shouldn’t be here, and nowhere else but with yourself, as they represent the approximation of the two worlds of spirit and body or of ego and self. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 179.
It isn’t possible to kill part of your “self” unless you kill yourself first. If you ruin your conscious personality, the so-called ego-personality, you deprive the self of its real goal, namely to become real itself. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 25-26.
The goal of life is the realization of the self. If you kill yourself you abolish that will of the self that guides you through life to that eventual goal. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 25-26.
You ought to realize that suicide is murder, since after suicide there remains a corpse exactly as with any ordi- nary murder. Only it is yourself that has been killed. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 25-26.
If you try to be literal about the doctrine, you are putting yourself aside until there is nobody left that would represent it but corpse. If, on the other hand, you truly assimilate the doctrine, you will alter it creatively by your individual understanding and thus give life to it. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 163-174
When you recognize yourself, you have not necessarily recognized the self but perhaps only an infinitesimal Part of it, though the self has given you the light. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 194-196
As long as you [Victor White] do not identify yourself with the avenging angel, I can feel your humanity and I can tell you that I am really sorry for my misdeeds and sore about God’s ways with the poor anthropoids that were meant to have a brain enabling them to think critically. Carl Jung, Letters, Vol. II, Pages 238-243.
As “contemporary” symbols of the opposites, the fishes have a tendency to devour each other if only they are left alone. In the end you have no alternative but to take the conflicts on yourself by ceasing to identify now with one side and now with the other. You become what happens in the middle. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 291.
But if you are now in the dumps and up to your ears in the mire, you must tell yourself that you were obvi- ously flying too high and that a dose of undiluted hellish blackness was indicated. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 298.
If you are all alone then it is because you isolate yourself; if you are humble enough you are never alone. Nothing isolates us more than power and prestige. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 361
Unlike me, you torment yourself with the ethical problem. I am tormented by it. It is a problem that cannot be caught in any formula, twist and turn it as I may; for what we are dealing with here is the living will of God. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 379-380
Knowing more about the soul and its mysteries you could free yourself from the fascination which makes you suffer. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 402.
Everything that is necessary can be lived if only you will stand by yourself and endure things as they are with- out grumbling. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 456.
The experience of wholeness is, quite to the contrary, an extremely simple matter of feeling yourself in har- mony with the world within and without. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 456.
It is legitimate to ask yourself what it is that carries the qualities of the archetypal and synchronistic, and to pose the question, for instance, of the intrinsic nature of the psyche or of matter. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445-449
The dream of X. means chiefly that it would be advisable to you to give yourself that kind of loving attention as well as whatever X. means for you in yourself. In other words: worry about yourself more than about others; see and understand what you do more than what you assume other people do. Otherwise you will be accused of a meddling power drive. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 515-516
If you don’t feel self-sufficient, give yourself the chance to take yourself as self-sufficient even if you don’t be- lieve it, but make an effort to allow such kindness to yourself. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 515-516
You cannot apply kindness and understanding to others if you have not applied it to yourself.Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 515-516
The outer opposition is an image of my inner opposition. Once I realize this, I remain silent and think of the chasm of antagonism in my soul. Outer oppositions are easy to overcome. They indeed exist, but nevertheless you can be united with yourself. They will indeed burn and freeze your soles, but only your soles. It hurts, but you continue and look toward distant goals. Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 279.
As you have found out for yourself, the I Ching consists of readable archetypes, and it very often presents not only a picture of the actual situation but also of the future, exactly like dreams. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 584-585
But if you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself. Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 556, Para 906.
The more manly you are, the more remote from you is what woman really is, since the feminine in yourself is alien and contemptuous. Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 263.
Outer oppositions are easy to overcome. They indeed exist, but nevertheless you can be united with yourself. Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 279.
It is not only stupid to exchange your own life for an alien one, but also a hypocritical game, because you can never really live the life of others, you can only pretend to do it, deceiving the other and yourself, since you can only live your own life. Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 249
You should carry the monastery in yourself. The desert is within you. Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 230.
You can never get to yourself without loving your neighbour—that is indispensable; you would never arrive at yourself if you were isolated on top of Mt. Everest, because you never would have a chance to know yourself. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1020
And if you lose yourself in the crowd, in the whole of humanity, you also never arrive at yourself; just as you can get lost in your isolation, you can also get lost in utter abandonment to the crowd. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1020
If you fulfil the pattern that is peculiar to yourself, you have loved yourself, you have accumulated and have abundance; you bestow virtue then because you have luster. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 502
But if you hate and despise yourself—if you have not accepted your pattern— then there are hungry animals (prowling cats and other beasts and vermin) in your constitution which get at your neighbours like flies in order to satisfy the appetites which you have failed to satisfy. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 502
Don’t run away and make yourself unconscious of bodily facts, for they keep you in real life and help you not to lose your real way in the world of mere possibilities where you are simply blindfolded. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 66
You don’t see the archetypal world, but live like a pressed flower in the pages of a book, a mere memory of yourself. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 972.
The great lure of the archetypal situation is that you yourself suddenly cease to be. You cease to think and are acted upon as though carried by a great river with no end. You are suddenly eternal. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 240.
It does not matter whether you do a thing or whether it happens to you; whether it reaches you from with- out or happens within, fate moves through yourself and outside circumstances equally. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 896
If you yourself can provide for it, then you are the whole mystery of the church: you are the transubstantiation. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1012-1013
I could even go as far as to say that without the anima and animus there would be no object, no other human being, because you perceive differences only through that which is a likeness to the differences in yourself. Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1357
You can only know yourself if you get into yourself, and you can only do that when you accept the lead of the animal. Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 458.
By removing yourself from the dogma you get into the world which is increasingly chaotic and primitive, in which you must find
or create a new orientation. Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 905