This expression, “God’s world,” may sound sentimental to some ears. For me it did not have this character at all. To “God’s world” belonged everything superhuman dazzling light, the darkness of the abyss, the cold impassivity of infinite space and time, and the uncanny grotesqueness of the irrational world of chance. “God,” for me, was everything and anything but “edifying.” ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 72.
The dead who besiege us are souls who have not fulfilled the principium individuationis, or else they would have become distant stars. Insofar as we do not fulfill it, the dead have a claim on us and besiege us and we cannot escape them. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Appendix C; Page 370
Myth is the revelation of divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth; rather it speaks to us as a Word of God. No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science. For it is not that “God” is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth; rather it speaks to us as a Word of God. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 340.
We still attribute to the other fellow all the evil and inferior qualities that we do not like to recognize in ourselves, and therefore have to criticize and attack him, when all that has happened is that an inferior “soul” has emigrated from one person to another. The world is still full of betes noires and scapegoats, just as it formerly teemed with witches and werewolves. ~Carl Jung; Civilization in Transition Page 130.
The marked tendency of the Western democracies to internal dissension is the very thing that could lead them to a more hopeful path. ~Carl Jung; CW 10; Page 225.
Love “bears all things” and “endures all things’* (i Cor. 13:7). These words say all there is to be said; nothing can be added to them. For we are in the deepest sense the victims and the instruments of cosmogonic “love.” ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 354
This meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one’s own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is. ~Carl Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, vol. 9, pt. 1 p. 21
Nowhere are we closer to the sublime secret of all origination than in the recognition of our own selves, whom we always think we know already. Yet we know the immensities of space better than we know our own depths, where -even though we do not understand it-we can listen directly to the throb of creation itself. “Analytical Psychology and Weltanshauung” (1928). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P. 737
Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. ~Carl Jung; The Philosophical Tree; CW 13: Alchemical Studies. P.335
Dreams…are invariably seeking to express something that the ego does not know and does not understand. ~Carl Jung Quotation, CW 17, Paragraph 187
Whatever explanation or interpretation does to it, we do to our own souls as well, with corresponding results for our own well-being. ~Carl Jung; CW 9; Page 160
The spirit of the depths took my understanding and all my knowledge and placed them at the service of the Inexplicable and the paradoxical. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 229
One clings to possessions that have once meant wealth; and the more ineffective, incomprehensible, and lifeless they become the more obstinately people cling to them. (Naturally it is only sterile ideas that they cling to; living ideas have content and riches enough, so there is no need to cling to them.) Thus in the course of time the meaningful turns into the meaningless. This is unfortunately the fate of metaphysical ideas.~Carl Jung; Aion;Page 34; Paragraph 65.
The sea is like music, it has all the dreams of the soul within itself and sounds them over. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 369.
Christ cried out to the Jews, “You are the Gods” (John 10:34) but men were incapable of understanding what he meant. ~Carl Jung; Memories dreams and Reflections; Page 280
Being a part, man cannot grasp the whole. He is at its mercy. He may assent to it, or rebel against it; but he is always caught up by it and enclosed within it. He is dependent upon it and is sustained by it. Love is his light and his darkness, whose end he cannot see. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 354
Eros…might well be the first condition of all cognition and the quintessence of divinity itself. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Late Thoughts; Page 353.
I want to exist from my own force, like the sun, which gives light and does not suck light. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 277
Any large company composed of wholly admirable persons has the morality and intelligence of an unwieldy, stupid and violent animal. ~Carl Jung; CW 10; Page 228
As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 356.
God is a psychic fact of immediate experience; otherwise there would never have been any talk of God. The fact is valid in itself, requiring no non-psychological proof and inaccessible to any form of non-psychological criticism. It can be the most immediate and hence the most real of experiences, which can be neither ridiculed nor disproved. ~Carl Jung
Seldom, or perhaps never, does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain. ~Carl Jung, Contributions to Analytical Psychology, P. 193
As the individual is not just a single, separate being, but by his very existence presupposes a collective relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must lead to more intense and broader collective relationships and not to isolation. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 758
As scientific understanding has grown, so our world has become dehumanized. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional ‘unconscious identity’ with natural phenomena. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 85.
Just as the “psychic infra-red,” the biological instinctual psyche, gradually passes over into the physiology of the organism and thus merges with its chemical and physical conditions, so the “psychic ultra-violet,” the archetype, describes a field which exhibits none of the peculiarities of the physiological and yet, in the last analysis, can no longer be regarded as psychic. ~Carl Jung; On the Nature of the Psyche; CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche; Page 420.
You see, you have that lie detector in the United States, and that’s like an association test I have worked out with the psycho-galvanic phenomenon. Also, we have done a lot of work on the Pneumograph which will show the decrease of volume of breathing under the influence of a complex. You know, one of the reasons for tuberculosis is the manifestation of a complex.
People have very shallow breathing; don’t ventilate the aspices of their lungs anymore, and get tuberculosis. Half of tuberculosis cases are psychic. ~C.G. Jung – Richard Evans interviews Transcript of the 1957 films.
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic text from the literature of the whole world – all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls. Thus the soul has been turned into a Nazareth Gradually from which nothing good can come. Therefore let us fetch it from the four corners of the earth – the more far-fetched and bizarre it is the better. ~ Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 99 .
While the man who despairs marches towards nothingness, the one who has placed his faith in the archetype follows the tracks of life and lives right into his death. Both, to be sure, remain in uncertainty, but the one lives against his instincts, the other with them. ~Carl Jung; MDR; Page 306.
We cannot slay death, as we have already taken all life from it. If we still want to overcome death, then we must enliven it. Therefore on your journey be sure to take golden cups full of the sweet drink of life, red wine, and give it to dead matter, so that it can win life back. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 244.
I have become convinced that at least part of our psychic existence is characterized by the relativity of space and time. This relativity seems to increase, in proportion to the distance from consciousness, to an absolute condition of timelessness and spacelessness. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 305.
The individual may strive after perfection . . . but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness. [“Christ, A Symbol of the Self, ibid” par. 123.]
The mystery of the Eucharist transforms the soul of the empirical man, who is only a part of himself, into his totality, symbolically expressed by Christ. In this sense, therefore, we can speak of the Mass as the rite of the individuation process. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Religion
Man always has some mental reservation, even in the face of divine decrees. Otherwise, where would be his freedom? And what would be the use of that freedom if it could not threaten Him who threatens it? ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 220
The finest and most significant conversations of my life were anonymous. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 145.
If thou wouldst complete the diamond body with no out-flowing. Diligently heat the roots of consciousness and life. Kindle light in the blessed country ever close at hand, And there hidden, let thy true self always dwell. ~Carl Jung; The Secret of the Golden Flower.
These things came to pass, they say, that Jesus might be made the first sacrifice in the discrimination of composite natures. ~Hippolytus; Elenchos vii; 27.8 (Cited by Carl Jung in Aion.)
Rather, we must hold clearly in mind that there is no possible way for us to attain certainty concerning things that pass our understanding. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 300.
Psychology does not know what good and evil are in themselves; it knows them only as judgments about relationships. ~Carl Jung; Aion; Page 53.
Here the soul drew near to my ear and whispered, “The Gods are even happy to turn a blind eye from time to time, since basically they know very well that it would be bad for life if there were no exception to eternal law. Hence their tolerance of the devil. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 359.
Through the Christ crucified between the two thieves, man gradually attained knowledge of his shadow and its duality. This duality had already been anticipated by the double meaning of the serpent. Just as the serpent stands for the power that heals as well as corrupts, so one of the thieves is destined upwards, the other downwards, and so likewise the shadow is on one side regrettable and reprehensible weakness, on the other side healthy instinctively and the prerequisite for higher consciousness. ~Carl Jung; Aion; Page 255; Para 402.
Primitive superstition lies just below the surface of even the most tough-minded individuals, and it is precisely those who most fight against it who are the first to succumb to its suggestive effects. ~Carl Jung; Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle; Page 25.
The concept of the unconscious is for me an exclusively psychological concept, and not a philosophical concept of a metaphysical nature. In my view the unconscious is a psychological borderline concept, which covers all psychic contents or processes that are not conscious, i.e., not related to the ego in any perceptible way. My justification for speaking of the existence of unconscious processes at all is derived simply and solely from experience. ~Carl Jung; Definitions; CW 6, par. 837.
Insanity is possession by an unconscious content that, as such, is not assimilatable to consciousness, nor can it be assimilated since the very existence of such contents is denied. ~Carl Jung; Alchemical Studies; Collected Works 13, par 53.
All ages before ours believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment in symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, which is to say, as archetypes of the unconscious. No doubt this discovery is hardly credible as yet. ~Carl Jung; The Integration of the Personality p. 72
Here the soul drew near to my ear and whispered, “The Gods are even happy to turn a blind eye from time to time, since basically they know very well that it would be bad for life if there were no exception to eternal law. Hence their tolerance of the devil. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 359.
The God-image in man was not destroyed by the Fall but was only damaged and corrupted (‘deformed’), and can be restored through God’s grace. The scope of the integration is suggested by the descent of Christ’s soul to hell, its work of redemption embracing even the dead. The psychological equivalent of this is the integration of the collective unconscious which forms an essential part of the individuation process. ~Carl Jung; Aion; Page 39; Para 72.