Carl Jung Quotations 22
The elements are of an earthly nature, the physical and chemical constituents of our bodies. These are the earth in us, so to speak, and the stars represent the beginning of psychical life, the influence of the stars in the condition of the chaos. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 229.
You can put the most marvellous things before the eyes of a stupid person and they will make no impression on him, for all impressions come from inside ourselves. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 226.
The things, which impress us from outside, can only do so because of our inner attitude. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 226.
The beautiful old name, Elizabeth, is a remnant of the same idea. It originated in Babylon and means: “My deity is the seven”, that is, these even planets, for only seven were known in those days. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Pages 225-226.
The well-known sentence in the Lord’s Prayer, “Deliver us from evil”, meant, as it was first understood, deliver us from the evil principle of the Heimarmene. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 225.
And it is a curious fact that, all over the earth wherever we find astrology, the stars have essentially the same meaning. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 225.
While a man sees something in the sky, there is no chance of his seeing it in himself, and so naturally he will attribute his own actions to the stars. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 225.
Even today the majority of people have no idea what psychology is; they have a personal psychology and some metaphysical convictions. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 224.
We could define the unconscious as a psychical existence in ourselves of which we are unconscious. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 224.
Clearly the veil of maya cannot be lifted by a mere decision of reason, but demands the most thoroughgoing and persevering preparation consisting in the full payment of all debts to life. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 113.
Insanity is possession by an unconscious content which, as such, is not assimilated to consciousness; nor can it be assimilated, since the conscious mind has denied the existence of such contents. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 111.
In this respect our time is caught in a fatal error: we believe we can criticize religious facts intellectually; we think, for instance, like Laplace, that God is a hypothesis which can be subjected to intellectual treatment, to affirmation or denial. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 110.
Our true religion is a monotheism of consciousness, a possession by it, coupled with a fanatical denial that there are parts of the psyche which are autonomous. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 110.
That is the reason, too, that our time is so utterly godless and profane, for we lack knowledge of the unconscious psyche and pursue the cult of consciousness to the exclusion of all else. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 110.
If tendencies towards disassociation were not inherent in the human psyche, parts never would have been split off; in other words, neither spirits nor gods would ever have come to exist. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Pages 109-110.
Human nature [hsing] and consciousness [hui] are expressed in light symbolism, and are therefore intensity, while life [ming] would coincide with extensity. The first have the character of the yang principle, the latter of the yin. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 101.
And this being has body, soul and spirit, and is, therefore, the principle of life itself, as well as the principle of individuation. Its nature is spiritual, it cannot be seen, and it contains an invisible image. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 221.
Therefore the prima materia is called “monad”, “ens reale” and “forma interna”, that is, it is the inner form which gives things their existence, and is, therefore, the cause of all existence. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 221.
To put it more simply: the prima materia can be won from the centre of a stone or substance, but then it is no longer designated as a substance but as an agent. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 221.
…the serpent is the hypostatic, underlying materia (the essence of matter), which sinks into the water, or is as it were in the water, and, through illusion, it deceives the senses. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 219.
Living matter is a mystery which is beyond our understanding, if only for the reason that we ourselves consist of living matter. We cannot climb above our own heads, a fact which should be a warning to all those people who try to explain the nature of God. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 216.
One could say, in a certain sense, that the unconscious was the invisible, psychical part of the tangible and visible nervous system, just as one might say consciousness was the invisible part of the brain. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 216.
Since the time of the old Gnostics, the serpent has been the symbol for the brain and its appendages; that is, for the lower centres of the brain and for the spinal cord, partly on account of its shape, but also from introspective reasons. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 216.
This serpent does not represent “reason” or anything approaching it, but rather symbolises a peculiar autonomous mind which can possess one completely, a spirit of revelation which gives us “Intuitionen” (intuitions). ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 215.
The snake in alchemy is the “mercurial serpent”, the old Gnostic image for the Nous, the mind, where the spirit was represented as a serpent, as the Agathodaemon (the good daemon), or directly called the serpent of the Nous. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 215.
The idea is that primeval man possessed a substance, a sort of earth, out of which Paradise could grow, and Adam (or primeval man) carries the secret of this earth in himself. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 215.
One source is the unconscious, which spontaneously produces such fantasies; the other source is life, which, if lived with complete devotion, brings an intuition of the self, the individual being. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 99.
Among my patients I have come across cases of women who did not draw mandalas but who danced them instead. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 97.
Without doubt, also, the realization of the opposite hidden in the unconscious, i.e. the ‘reversal’, signifies reunion with the unconscious laws of being, and the purpose of this reunion is the attainment of conscious life or, expressed in Chinese terms, the bringing about of the Tao. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Pages 95-96.
According to the Hui Ming Ching, the ancient sages knew how to bridge the gap between consciousness and life because they cultivated both. In this way the shelf, the immortal body, is ‘melted out’, and in this way ‘the great Tao is completed’. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 95.
If thou wouldst complete the diamond body with no outflowing, Diligently heat the roots of consciousness and life. ~Hui Ming Ching, Cited Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 95.
‘The subtlest secret of the Tao is human nature and life.’ ~Hui Ming Ching, Cited Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 94.
The West is the land of the dead, the sun sinks in the West, it is there that the day, and life itself, sink, so to speak, into eternity. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 210.
Mylius also calls it “perpetua” (perpetual). It is eternal and “susceptible”, that is, it receives the eternal images which God impresses on it, and therefore all living beings find their origin in it. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 210.
According to the conception of Paracelsus, every man receives this inner image of the heavens at the moment of his birth, and has, therefore, his own individual firmament within himself. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 209.
Whether a person’s fate comes to him from without or from within, the experiences and events of the way remain the same. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 93.
Everything good is costly, and the development of the personality is one of the most costly of all things. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 92.
One man will chiefly take what comes to him from without, and the other what comes from within, and, according to the law of life, the one will have to take from the outside something he never could accept before from outside, and the other will accept from within things which would always have been excluded before. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 92.
The art of letting things happen, action through non-action, letting go of oneself, as taught by Meister Eckhart, became for me the key opening the door to the way. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 90
If it arose from outside, it became a deeply subjective experience; if it arose from within, it became an outer event. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 89.
The new thing came to them out of obscure possibilities either outside or inside themselves; they accepted it and developed further by means of it. It seemed to me typical that some took the new thing from outside themselves, others from within; or rather, that it grew into some persons from without, and into others from within. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 89.
I had learned in the meanwhile that the greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They must be so because they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 89.
I always worked with the temperamental conviction that fundamentally there are no insoluble problems, and experience justified me in so far as I have often seen individuals simply outgrow a problem which had destroyed others. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 88.
Consciousness thus is torn from its roots and no longer able to appeal to the authority of the archetypal images; it has Promethean freedom, it is true, but also a godless hybris. It does indeed soar above the earth, even above mankind, but the danger of an upset is there, not for every individual, to be sure, but collectively for the weak. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 85.
The various lines of psychic development start from one common stock whose roots reach back into all the strata of the past. This also explains the psychological parallelisms with animals. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 84.
…it must be pointed out that just as the human body shows a common anatomy over and above all racial differences, so, too, the psyche possesses a common substratum transcending all differences in culture and consciousness. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 84.
“Go to the streams of the river Nile and there thou wilt find a stone which has a spirit. Take this stone, divide it and put thy hand inside it and draw out its heart: for its soul is in its heart.” ~Ostanes cited by Carl Jung, ETH, Page 205.
We think of a chaos as complete confusion, but to the alchemists it was a confusion of definite qualities and of special factors. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Pages 201-202.
We think: “How peculiar that person is”, but no one is peculiar really. People seem odd to us when they possess qualities which we do not see in ourselves. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 198.
This is a Platonic idea; the anima, as animation par excellence, is the principle of movement. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 198.
Apparently God the Father is thought of here as the soul, the anima mundi, which is the centre of the world, and which at the same time enfolds the whole world, or rather the universe including the starry heavens. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 198.