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Jesus voluntarily exposed himself to the assaults [from within] of the imperialistic madness that filled everyone, conqueror and conquered alike. ~Carl Jung, The Development of the Personality, CW 17, par. 309.
We all must do just what Christ did. We must make our experiment. We must make mistakes. We must live out our own vision of life. And there will be
error. If you avoid error you do not live. ~Carl Jung, Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, p. 98.
It is possible to have an attitude to the external conditions of life only when there is a point of reference outside them. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Civilization in Transition, CW 10, par. 506.
I find that all my thoughts circle around God like the planets around the sun, and are as irresistibly attracted by Him. I would feel it to be the grossest sin if I were to oppose any resistance to this force. ~Carl Jung; The Face of the Deep: The Religious Ideas of C.G. Jung; p. 18.
Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own, i.e, the true expression of your individuality. ~Ca.rl Jung to Miguel Serrano, Letters Vol. II, Page 592
You are the suffering heart of your one star God, who is Abraxas to his world. ~Carl Jung’s Soul, The Red Book, Page 371.
You have the one God, and you become your one God in the innumerable number of Gods. ~Carl Jung’s Soul, The Red Book, Page 371.
The death of Christ took no suffering away from the world, but his life has taught us much; namely, that it pleases the one God if the individual lives his own life against the power of Abraxas. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 371.
Loneliness is for me a source of healing that makes my life worth living. Talking is often a torment to me, and I need several days of silence to recover the futility of words. ~Carl Jung
Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you. ~Attributed to but unproven to have been spoken by Carl Jung.
A variety of forms is revealed through the realization of the self. The self is dissolved into many egos. When the self has become conscious it leads to “participation mystique.” ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 36.
I hope you agree with the Nuremberg decisions and will stand loyally by our Jung. I want him to acquire an authority that will later qualify him for leadership of the whole movement. ~Sigmund Freud to Oskar Pfister, Feb. 5, 1910.
It seems to me probable that the real nature of the archetype is not capable of being made conscious, that it is transcendent, on which account I call it psychoid. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, para. 417.
And if we happen to have a precognitive dream, how can we possibly ascribe it to our own powers? ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 340.
Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 340.
The idea of angels, archangels, “principalities and powers” in St. Paul, the archons of the Gnostics, the heavenly hierarchy of Dionysius the Areopagite, all come from the perception of the relative autonomy of the archetypes. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Page 66, Para 104.
Like any archetype, the essential nature of the self is unknowable, but its manifestations are the content of myth and legend. ~Carl Jung, Definitions CW 6, Para 790.
Our mind is the scene upon which the gods perform their plays, and we don’t know the beginning and we don’t know the end. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1306.
No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you. ~Carl Jung citing an Alchemist, Letters Vol II, Page 595.
We cannot say the side of the spirit is twice as good as the other side; we must bring the pairs of opposites together in an altogether different way, where the rights of the body are just as much recognized as the rights of the spirit. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 235.
You see, somewhere our unconscious becomes material, because the body is the living unit, and our conscious and our unconscious are embedded in it: the contact the body. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 441.
My consciousness is like an eye that penetrates to the most distant spaces, yet it is the psychic non-ego that fills them with non-spatial images. And these images are not pale shadows, but tremendously powerful psychic factors. . . . ~Carl Jung, Freud and Psychoanalysis, CW 4, pp. 331 f.
It was universally believed in the Middle Ages as well as in the Greco-Roman world that the soul is a substance. Indeed, mankind as a whole has held this belief from its earliest beginnings, and it was left for the second half of the nineteenth century to develop a “psychology without the soul.” ~Carl Jung; CW 8; Page 338
My consciousness is like an eye that penetrates to the most distant spaces, yet it is the psychic non-ego that fills them with non-spatial images. And these images are not pale shadows, but tremendously powerful psychic factors. . . . ~Carl Jung, Freud and Psychoanalysis, CW 4, pp. 331 f.
The risk of inner experience, the adventure of the spirit, is in any case alien to most human beings. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Pages 141-142.
Thus your soul is your own self in the spiritual world. As the abode of the spirits, however, the spiritual world is also an outer world. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 288.
We must find out how to get everything back into connection with everything else. We must resist the vice of intellectualism, and get it understood that we cannot only understand. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounter, Page 420.
This inner world is truly infinite, in no way poorer than the outer one. Man lives in two worlds. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 264.
The development of modern art with its seemingly nihilistic trend towards disintegration must be understood as the symptom and symbol of a mood of universal destruction and renewal that has set its mark on our age. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Pages 303-304.
I had the feeling that everything was being sloughed away. . . . Nevertheless something remained; it was as if I now carried along with me everything I had ever experienced or done, everything that had happened around me. . . . I consisted of my own history, and I felt with great certainty: this is what I am. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 290-291.
He [the psychotherapist] is not just working for this particular patient, who may be quite insignificant, but for himself as well and his own soul, and in so doing he is perhaps laying an infinitesimal grain in the scales of humanity’s soul. Small and invisible as this contribution may be, it is yet an opus magnum. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, par. 449.
The future indwelling of the Holy Spirit amounts to a continuing incarnation of God. Christ, as the begotten son of God and pre-existing mediator, is a first-born and a divine paradigm which will be followed by further incarnations of the Holy Ghost in the empirical man. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Para. 693.
Man’s task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 326.
Existence is only real when it is conscious to somebody. That is why the Creator needs conscious man even though, from sheer unconsciousness, he would like to prevent him from becoming conscious. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, Par. 575.
Whoever knows God has an effect on him. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, para. 617.
The soul demands your folly; not your wisdom. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 264.
Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 235.
In the experience of the self it is no longer the opposites “God” and “man” that are reconciled, as it was before, but rather the opposites within the God-image itself. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 338.
We need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself . . . We know nothing of man, far too little. His psyche should be studied because we are the origin of all coming evil. ~Carl Jung, BBC interview, 1959.
Your voice is too weak for those raging to be able to hear. Thus do not speak and do not show the God, but sit in a solitary place and sing incantations in the ancient manner. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 284.
Bring your God with you. Bear him down to your dark land where people live who rub their eyes each morning and yet always see the same thing and never anything else. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 283.
If no outer adventure happens to you, then no inner in adventure happens to you either. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 263.
No one has my God, but my God has everyone. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 245.
You begin to have a presentiment of the whole when you embrace your opposite principle, since the whole belongs to both principles, which grow from one root. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, LN 248
Man must recognize his complicity in the act of evil. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, LN 291.
I am ignorant of your mystery. Forgive me if I speak as in a dream, like a drunkard—are you God?” ~Carl Jung to his Soul, The Red Book, Page 233.
It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 326.
It is a pity that you did not meet or speak to Jung. You could have told him from me that he is at perfect liberty to develop views divergent from mine, and that I ask him to do so without a bad conscience. ~Sigmund Freud to Oskar Pfister, April 7, 1912
The reason I write to you about family matters is that no visitor since Jung has so much impressed the children and done me so much good ~Sigmund Freud to Oskar Pfister, Dec. 7, 1909.
For it is the function of consciousness not only to recognize and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses, but to translate into visible reality the world within us. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 342.
Into what mist and darkness does your path lead? … I limp after you on crutches of understanding. I am a man and you stride like a God. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 234.
I am weary, my soul, my wandering has lasted too long, my search for myself outside of myself. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 233.
Hence I had to speak to my soul as to something far off and unknown, which did not exist through me, but through whom I existed. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 232.
Meine Seele, meine Seele, wo bist Du? (My Soul, my Soul, where are You?) …~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Pages 232.
I had to accept that what I had previously called my soul was not at all my soul, but a dead system that I had contrived. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book Page 232.
Thank God I’m Jung and not a Jungian. ~Carl Jung, Jung: A Biography (Hannah), Page 78.
After the disgraceful defection of Adler, a gifted thinker but a malicious paranoiac, I am now in trouble with our friend, Jung, who apparently has not outgrown his own neurosis.” ~Sigmund Freud to James Jackson Putnam, 20Aug1912.
Biographies should show people in their undershirts. Goethe had his weaknesses, and Calvin was often cruel. Considerations of this kind reveal the true greatness of a man. This way of looking at things is better than false hero worship! ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 165.
[Uniting symbols] arise from the collision between the conscious and the unconscious and from the confusion which this causes (known in alchemy as ‘chaos’ or ‘nigredo’). Empirically, this confusion takes the form of restlessness and disorientation. ~Carl Jung, Aion, CW 9 II, §304.
This primary substance [the chaos] is round (massa globosa, rotundum), like the world and the world-soul; it is in fact the world-soul and the world-substance in one. ~Carl Jung, Aion CW 9 II: §376
All I have written is correct. . . . I only realize its full reality now ~Carl Jung; Jung His Life and Work; Page 279.
The world hangs on a thin thread, and that thread is the psyche of man. ~Carl Jung; Conversations with Carl Jung, and Reactions from Ernest Jones by Richard I. Evans.
Not nature but the “genius of mankind” has knotted the hangman’s noose with which it can execute itself at any moment. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 734.
In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch. ~Carl Jung; CW 10; Para. 315.
Not nature but the “genius of mankind” has knotted the hangman’s noose with which it can execute itself at any moment. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 734.
The heaping together of paintings by Old Masters in museums is a catastrophe; likewise, a collection of a hundred Great Brains makes one big fathead. ~Carl Jung; CW 10; Page 500; Para 944.
Because the European does not know his own unconscious, he does not understand the East and projects into it everything he fears and despises in himself. ~Carl Jung; CW 18; Page 530; Para 1253.
Yoga in Mayfair or Fifth Avenue, or in any other place which is on the telephone, is a spiritual fake. ~Carl Jung; CW 11; Page 500; Para 802.
Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not. ~Carl Jung; CW 9ii; Para 429.
The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid. ~Carl Jung; CW 8; Para 774.
From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life. ~Carl Jung; CW 8; Para 800.
Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 329.
Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking. The one is but the shadow of the other. ~Carl Jung; CW 7; Page 53; Para 78.
The psychiatrist knows only too well how each of us becomes the helpless but not pitiable victim of his own sentiments. Sentimentality is the superstructure erected upon brutality. ~Carl Jung; CW 15; Page 122; Para 284.
Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i; Par. 227
If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool. ~Carl Jung; CW 14; Para 147.
It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts. ~Carl Jung; CW 10, para. 408.
The word “belief” is a difficult thing for me. I don’t believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it—I don’t need to believe it. ~Carl Jung; Interview in Hugh Burnett; Face to Face (1959); Page 51.
Nothing is more repulsive than a furtively prurient spirituality; it is just as unsavory as gross sensuality. ~Carl Jung; CW 17, Para. 336.
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood? ~Carl Jung; CW 10; para. 26.
Never apply any theory, but always ask the patient how he feels about his dream images. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 123.
There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of the creative fire. ~Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Page 169.
No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Page 44.
And you, my soul, I found again, first in images within men and then you yourself I found you where I least expected you. You climbed out of a dark shaft. You announced yourself to me in advance in dreams. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 233.
Joy comes from fulfillment, but not from longing. ~Philemon to Carl Jung; The Red Book, Page 341.
Myths which day has forgotten continue to be told by night, and powerful figures which consciousness has reduced to banality and ridiculous triviality are recognized again by poets and prophetically revived; therefore they can also be recognized “in changed form” by the thoughtful person. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 282.
The myth of the necessary incarnation of God . . . can be understood as man’s creative confrontation with the opposites and their synthesis in the self, the wholeness of his personality. . . . That is the goal . . . which fits man meaningfully into the scheme of creation and at the same time confers meaning upon it. –Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Page 338.
Being a scientist I prefer not to be a prophet if I can help it. I am in no position to ascertain facts of the future. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 513.
For two personalities to meet is like mixing two chemical substances: if there is any combination at all, both are transformed. ~. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, The Practice of Psychotherapy, Para 163.
No one knows what happened during the three days Christ was in Hell. I have experienced it. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 243.
My master and my brother, I believe you have completed your work…. What one individual can do for men, you have done and accomplished and fulfilled. The time has come when each must do his own work of redemption. Mankind has grown older and a new month has begun. ~Christ to Dr. Jung, The Red Book, Page 356.
I am the egg that surrounds and nurtures the seed of the God in me. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 284.
My Soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you—are you there? I have returned, I am here again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you, I am with you. After long years of long wandering, I have come to you again…. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 232.
In science I missed the factor of meaning; and in religion, that of empiricism. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 72.
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. ~Carl Jung, Carl Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Page 394.
Our civilization is still young, and young civilizations need all the arts of the animal-tamer to make the defiant barbarian and the savage in us more or less tractable. ~Carl Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy, Page 75.
What a thinker does not think he believes does not exist, and what one who feels does not feel he believes does not exist. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 248.
The prophet loved God, and this sanctified him. But Salome did not love God, and this profaned her. But the prophet did not love Salome, and this profaned him. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 248.
To be “normal” is the ideal aim for the unsuccessful, for all those who are still below the general level of adaptation. ~Carl Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy, Page 69.
My I, you are a barbarian. I want to live with you; therefore I will carry you through an utterly medieval Hell, until you are capable of making living with you bearable. You should be the vessel and womb of life, therefore I shall purify you. The touchstone is being alone with oneself. This is the way. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 330.
Whoever is in love is a full and overflowing vessel, and awaits the giving. Whoever is in fore thinking is deep and hollow and awaits fulfillment. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 253.
I did not attribute a religious function to the soul, I merely produced the facts which prove that the soul is naturaliter religiosa, i.e., possesses a religious function. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 14.
It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 14.
With a truly tragic delusion these theologians fail to see that it is not a matter of proving the existence of the light, but of blind people who do not know that their eyes could see. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 14.
The psyche is not of today; its ancestry goes back many millions of years. Individual consciousness is only the flower and the fruit of a season, sprung from the perennial rhizome beneath the earth; and it would find itself in better accord with the truth if it took the existence of the rhizome into its calculations. For the root matter is the mother of all things. ~Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation, Page xxv.
There are two offshoots from all the Aeons, having neither beginning nor end, from one root, and this root is a certain Power, an invisible and incomprehensible Silence. One of them appears on high and is a great power, the mind of the whole, who rules all things and is a male; the other below is a great Thought, a female giving birth to all things. ~Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, 136.
The world of the inner is as infinite as the world of the outer. Just as you become a part of the manifold essence of the world through your bodies, so you become a part of the manifold essence of the inner world through your soul. This inner world is truly infinite, in no way poorer than the outer one. Man lives in two worlds. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 264.
To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation. This is the creation of the new, and that redeems me. Salvation is the resolution of the task. The task is to give birth to the old in a new time. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 311.
The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Christ: A Symbol of the Self, Pages 70-71.
But the spirit of the depths had gained this power, because I had spoken to my soul during 25 nights in the desert and I had given her all my love and submission. But during the 25 days, I gave all my love and submission to things, to men, and to the thoughts of this time. I went into the desert only at night. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 238.
The healthy man does not torture others-generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers. ~Carl Jung; Civilization in Transition; Page 587.
. . . So, in the most natural way, I took it upon myself to get to know “my” myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks. . . . I simply had to know what unconscious or preconscious myth was forming me, from what rhizome I sprang. ~Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation, xxiv–xxv.
Conforming to the divine will I live for mankind, not only for myself, and whoever understands this message contained in and conveyed by my writing will also live for me. ~Carl Jung Letter to Victor White, 23 Jan 1947.
When the confusion is at its height a new revelation comes, i.e., at the beginning of the fourth month of world history. ~Carl Jung, Letters, Vol. I, Page 12 .
In the community every man shall submit to others, so that the community be maintained, for you need it. In singleness every man shall place himself above the other, so that every man may come to himself and avoid slavery. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 352.
Matter in alchemy is material and spiritual, and spirit spiritual and material. ~Carl Jung, Alchemical Studies, Page 140.
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.
We find in Gnosticism what was lacking in the centuries that followed: a belief in the efficacy of individual revelation and individual knowledge. This belief was rooted in the proud feeling of man’s affinity with the gods. ~Carl Jung, Psychological Types, Page 242.
…it is plain foolishness to believe in ready-made systematic guides to dream interpretation, as if one could simply buy a reference book and look up a particular symbol. ~Carl Jung, Man and his Symbols, Page 53.
Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.” ~Carl Jung, CW 16, The Practice of Psychotherapy, Para 181.
Children are educated by what the grownup is and not by what he says. ~Carl Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, The Psychology of the Child Archetype, Page 174.
Gnosis, as a special kind of knowledge, should not be confused with. “Gnosticism.” ~Carl Jung, Footnote #13, Psychology and Religion, Page 45.
Through reflection, “life” and its “soul” are abstracted from Nature and endowed with a separate existence. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 158.
It is a privilege born of human freedom in contradistinction to the compulsion of natural law. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Footnote 9, Page 158.
Gods are personifications of unconscious contents, for they reveal themselves to us through the unconscious activity of the psyche. Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 163.
My speech is imperfect. Not because I want to shine with words, but out of the impossibility of finding those words, I speak in images. With nothing else can I express the words from the depths. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 230.
I . . . have the feeling that this is a time full of marvels, and, if the auguries do not deceive us, it may very well be that . . . we are on the threshold of something really sensational, which I scarcely know how to describe except with the Gnostic concept of [Sophia], an Alexandrian term particularly suited to the reincarnation of ancient wisdom in the shape of ΨA. ~Carl Jung, The Freud/Jung Letters, Page 439
Before my illness I had often asked myself if I were permitted to publish or even speak of my secret knowledge. I later set it all down in Aion. I realized it was my duty to communicate these
thoughts, yet I doubted whether I was allowed to give expression to them. During my illness I received confirmation and I now knew that everything had meaning and that everything was perfect. ~Carl Jung, Jung–White Letters, Page 103.
Yesterday I had a marvellous dream: One bluish diamond-like star high in heaven, reflected in a round, quiet pool—heaven above, heaven below—. The imago Dei in the darkness of the Earth, this is myself. . . . It seems to me as if I were ready to die, although—as it looks to me—some powerful thoughts are still flickering like lightnings in a summer night. Yet they are not mine,
they belong to God, as everything else which bears mentioning. Carl Jung, The Jung–White Letters, Page 60.
Our age is seeking a new spring of life. I found one and drank of it and the water tasted good. ~Carl Jung, C. G. Jung, Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology, Page 443.
Well, you see, the [psychological] type is nothing static. It changes in the course of life… Carl Jung, C.G. Jung, Speaking, Pages 435.
As a natural scientist, thinking and sensation were uppermost in me and intuition and feeling were in the unconscious and contaminated by the collective unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Analytical Psychology: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1925, Page 69.
I most certainly was characterized by thinking … and I had a great deal of Intuition, too. And I had a definite difficulty with Feeling. And my relation to reality was not particularly brilliant. … I was often at variance with the reality of things. Now that gives you all the necessary data for diagnosis. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung, Speaking, Pages 435-6.
Small and hidden is the door that leads inward, and the entrance is barred by countless prejudices, mistaken assumptions, and fears. ~Carl Jung, Civilization in Transition, Page 154.
Our age wants to experience the psyche for itself. It wants original experience and not assumptions, though it is willing to make use of all the existing assumptions as a means to this end, including those of the recognized religions and the authentic sciences. .” ~Carl Jung, Civilization in Transition, Page 85.
“Magic is the science of the jungle.” ~Carl Jung, Civilization in Transition, Page 63
The dream is never a mere repetition of previous experiences, with only one specific exception: shock or shell shock dreams, which sometimes are completely identical repetitions of reality. That, in fact, is a proof of the traumatic effect. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dream Seminar, Page 21.
Birth is not a beginning of life but only a beginning of consciousness… ~Hermes to his son Tat, Libellus XIII.
The dream represents that tendency of the unconscious that aims at a change of the conscious attitude. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 5.
We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Page 262.
Dreams are very often anticipations of future alterations of consciousness… ~Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation, Page 51.
All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. ~Carl Jung, Civilization in Transition, Page 304.
One almost always forgets or omits to apply to oneself the criticism that one hands out so freely to others, fascinated by the mote in one’s brother’s eye. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Page 195
Every conscious act or event thus has an unconscious aspect, just as every sense-perception has a subliminal aspect: for instance, sound below or above audibility, or light below or above visibility. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Page 186.
No one can make history who is not willing to risk everything for it, to carry the experiment with his own life through to the bitter end, and to declare that his life is not a continuation of the past but a new beginning. ~Carl Jung, Civilization in Transition, Page 130.
For, in the last resort, we are conditioned not only by the past, but by the future, which is sketched out in us long beforehand and gradually evolves out of us. ~Carl Jung, Analytical Psychology and Education, Page 110.
But fanaticism is always a compensation for hidden doubt. Religious persecutions occur only where heresy is a menace. ~Carl Jung, Analytical Psychology and Education, Page 81.
Since we are psychic beings and not entirely dependent upon space and time, we can easily understand the central importance of the resurrection idea: we are not completely subjected to the powers of annihilation because our psychic totality reaches beyond the barrier of space and time. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Self, Page 695.
We do not know what an archetype is (i.e., consists of), since the nature of the psyche is inaccessible to us, but we know that archetypes exist and work. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Self, Page 694.
The better we understand the archetype, the more we participate in its life and the more we realize its eternity or timelessness. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Self, Page 695.
Could the longing for a god be a passion welling up from our darkest, instinctual nature, a passion unswayed by any outside influences, deeper and stronger perhaps than the love for a human person?” ~Carl Jung, CW 7, par 214.
The unconscious is, as the collective psyche, the psychological representative of society. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Page 453.
The individual is obliged by the collective demands to purchase his individuation at the cost of an equivalent work for the benefit of society. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Page 452.
Individuation and collectivity are a pair of opposites, two divergent destinies. They are related to one another by guilt. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Page 452.
But Mercurius is the divine winged Hermes manifest in matter, the god of revelation, lord of thought and sovereign psychopomp. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 292.
Reason becomes unreason when separated from the heart, and a psychic life void of universal ideas sickens from undernourishment. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Page 311.
Ideas are not just counters used by the calculating mind; they are also golden vessels full of living feeling. “Freedom” is not a mere abstraction, it is also an emotion. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Pages 310-311.
It is normal to think about immortality, and abnormal not to do so or not to bother about it. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Page 310.
No rules can cope with the paradoxes of life. Moral law, like natural law, represents only one aspect of reality. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Page 625.
In reply to your kind enquiry about “rules of life,” I would like to remark that I have had so much to do with people that I have always endeavored to live by no rules as far as possible. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Page 625.
The “Invisibles” further assert that our world of consciousness and the “Beyond” together form a single cosmos, with the result that the dead are not in a different place from the living. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Page 315.
The communications of “spirits” are statements about the unconscious psyche, provided that they are really spontaneous and are not cooked up by the conscious mind. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Page 313.
Not for nothing did alchemy style itself an “art,” feeling—and rightly so—that it was concerned with creative processes that can be truly grasped only by experience, though intellect may give them a name. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 482.
That from which things arise is the invisible and immovable God. ~Liber Platonis Quartorum, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 323.
But Mercurius is the divine winged Hermes manifest in matter, the god of revelation, lord of thought and sovereign psychopomp. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 292.
For the alchemist, the one primarily in need of redemption is not man, but the deity who is lost and sleeping in matter. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 312.
True, what the soul imagines happens only in the mind, but what God imagines happens in reality. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 280.
“Sense” and “nonsense” are merely man-made labels which serve to give us a reasonably valid sense of direction. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 222.
All life is bound to individual carriers who realize it, and it is simply inconceivable without them. But every carrier is charged with an individual destiny and destination, and the realization of these alone makes sense of life. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 222.
In the last analysis every life is the realization of a whole, that is, of a self, for which reason this realization can also be called “individuation.” ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 222.
It is only the intervention of time and space here and now that makes reality. Wholeness is realized for a moment only—the moment that Faust was seeking: all his life. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 214.
Just as the father represents collective consciousness, the traditional spirit, so the mother stands for the collective unconscious, the source of the water of life. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 71.
The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 81.
Life that just happens in and for itself is not real life; it is real only when it is known. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 81.
Natural man is not a “self”—he is the mass and a particle in the mass, collective to such a decree that he is not even sure of his own ego. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 81.
I conjecture that the treasure is also the “companion,” the one who goes through life at our side—in all probability a close analogy to the lonely ego who finds a mate in the self, for at first the self is the strange non-ego. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 117.
I conjecture that the treasure is also the “companion,” the one who goes through life at our side—in all probability a close analogy to the lonely ego who finds a mate in the self, for at first the self is the strange non-ego. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 117.
But no matter how much parents and grandparents may have sinned against the child, the man who is really adult will accept these sins as his own condition which has to be reckoned with. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 117.
In the light of the possibilities revealed by intuition, man’s earthliness is certainly a lamentable imperfection; but this very imperfection is part of his innate being, of his reality. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 114.
Only the gods can pass over the rainbow bridge; mortal men must stick to the earth and are subject to its laws. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 114.
We can never reach the level of our intuitions and should therefore not identify ourselves with them. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 114.
We should not rise above the earth with the aid of “spiritual” intuitions and run away from hard reality, as so often happens with people who have brilliant intuitions. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 114.
Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love. ~Sigmund Freud – letter to Carl Jung (1906)
One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful. ~Sigmund Freud Letter to Carl Jung, September 19, 1907.
Naturally, modern ignorance of and prejudice against intimate psychic experiences dismiss them as psychic anomalies and put them in psychiatric pigeon-holes without making the least attempt to understand them. ~Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Page 547.
If we now recall to what a degree the soul has humanized and realized itself, we can judge how very much it today expresses the body also, with which it is coexistent. ~Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Page 544.
To a man the anima is the Mother of God who gives birth to the Divine Child. To a woman the animus is the Holy Spirit, the procreator. He is at once the light and the dark God — not the Christian God of Love who contains neither the Devil nor the Son. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Pages 31-32.
Hildegard von Bingen transcended the animus; that is one woman’s service to the spirit. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 30.
I have been accused of deifying the soul. Not I but God Himself deified it.” ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 14.
It is the prime task of all education (of adults) to convey the archetype of the God image, or its emanations and effects, to the conscious mind. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 47.
Consciousness is the transformation and the transformer of the primordial instinctual images. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 9.
Consciousness is the divine light; it is the possibility of seeing oneself, and this means to me that it is the very basis of life. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 9.
But a conscious attitude that renounces its ego-bound intentions—not in imagination only, but in truth—and submits to the supra-personal decrees of fate, can claim to be serving a king. This more exalted attitude raises the status of the anima from that of a temptress to a psychopomp. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 380.
Since the soul animates the body, just as the soul is animated by the spirit, she tends to favour the body and everything bodily, sensuous, and emotional. She lies caught in “the chains” of Physis, and she desires “beyond physical necessity.” She must be called back by the “counsel of the spirit” from her lostness in matter and the world. ~Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Page 472.
We must enter into our mind [mentem], which is the eternal spiritual image of God within us, and this is to enter into the truth of the Lord; we must pass beyond ourselves to the eternal and preeminently spiritual, and to that which is above us . . . this is the threefold illumination of the one day. ~St. Bonaventure; Cited in Carl Jung’s, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Page 505.
It [the unconscious] is and remains beyond the reach of subjective arbitrary control, in a realm where nature and her secrets can be neither improved upon nor perverted, where we can listen but may not meddle. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 46.
The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not—which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 46.
It should therefore be an absolute rule to assume that every dream, and every part of a dream, is unknown at the outset, and to attempt an interpretation only after carefully taking up the context. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 44.
Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself: I am the LORD. ~Leviticus 18:19 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. ~Matthew 22:39.
Of course you really don’t make projections: they are; it is a mistake when one speaks of making a projection, because in that moment it is no longer a projection, but your own property. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1493.
Such things can happen: a projection is a very tangible thing, a sort of semi-substantial thing which forms a load as if it had real weight. It is exactly as the primitives understand it, a subtle body. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1495.
Of course you really don’t make projections: they are; it is a mistake when one speaks of making a projection, because in that moment it is no longer a projection, but your own property. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1493.
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.
Therefore, the very foundation of existence, the biological truth, is that each being is so interested in itself that it does love itself, thereby fulfilling the laws of its existence. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1477.
To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1473.
Voluptuousness, the lust principle, is Freud; passion for power is Adler; and selfishness-that is myself, perfectly simple. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1451.
Just as you cannot see the atomic world without applying all sorts of means to make it visible, so you cannot enter the unconscious unless there are certain synthesized figures. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1431-32.
Nature is awful, and I often ask myself, should one not interfere? But one cannot really, it is impossible, because fate must be fulfilled. It is apparently more important to nature that one should have consciousness, understanding, than to avoid suffering. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1416.
You live inasmuch as these Mendelian units are living. They have souls, are endowed with psychic life, the psychic life of that ancestor; or you can call it part of an ancestral soul. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1401.
Therefore intuitives develop all sorts of physical trouble, intestinal disturbances for instance, ulcers of the stomach or other really grave physical troubles. Because they overleap the body, it reacts against them. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1391-1392.
Our mind is the scene upon which the gods perform their plays, and we don’t know the beginning and we don’t know the end. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1306.
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 247.
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.
Nature herself is unconscious and the original man is unconscious; his great achievement against nature is that he becomes conscious. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1286.
Fire is the artificial light against nature, as consciousness is the light which man has made against nature.
…You can dream other people’s dreams, can get them through the walls. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1259.
For life comes to a man through the anima, in spite of the fact that he thinks it comes to him through the mind. He masters life through the mind but life lives in him through the anima. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1105.
Life that doesn’t overcome itself is really meaningless: it is not life; only inasmuch as life surpasses itself does it make sense. . ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1105.
In the shadow we are exactly like everybody; in the night all cats are grey-there is no difference. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1090.
But in reality God is not an opinion. God is a psychological fact that happens to people. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1037.
One could say that the stratification of our population was historical; there are certain people living who should not live yet. They are anachronistic. They anticipate the future. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1037.
The self is a fact of nature and always appears as such in immediate experiences, in dreams and visions, and so on; it is the spirit in the stone, the great secret which has to be worked out, to be extracted from nature, because it is buried in nature herself. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 977.
You see, it is as if the self were trying to manifest in space and time, but since it consists of so many elements that have neither space nor time qualities, it cannot bring them altogether into space and time. And those efforts of the self to manifest in the empirical world result in man: he is the result of the attempt. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 977.
If your life has not three dimensions, if you don’t live in the body, if you live on the two-dimensional plane in the paper world that is flat and printed, as if you were only living your biography, then you are nowhere. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 972.
There is no real life without archetypal experiences. The ordinary life is two-dimensional-it consists of pieces of paper-but the real life consists of three dimensions, and if it doesn’t it is not real life, but is a provisional life. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 970.
Zeus was director of Olympus, but he was responsible to the great board of directors of the world, the moira, an invisible influence, the “Faceless Corporation” of Olympus, so even Zeus could not do what he wanted. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 917.
God never was invented, it was always an occurrence, a psychological experience-and mind you, it is still the same experience today. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 916.
We know quite well that no man can ever become the self; the self is an entirely different order of things. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 925.
You see, in the actual functioning of the psyche, it does not matter whether you do a thing or whether it happens 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.
Half of the psychogenetic diseases occur where it is a matter of too much intuition, because intuition has this peculiar quality of taking people out of their ordinary reality. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 808.
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.
That center, that other order of consciousness which to me is unconscious, would be the self, and that doesn’t confine itself to myself, to my ego: it can include I don’t know how many other people. ~ Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 783.
It is the idea that the self is not identical with one particular individual. No individual can boast of having the self: there is only the self that can boast of having many individuals. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 782.
So the first science was astrology. That was an attempt of man to establish a line of communication between the remotest objects and himself. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1496.
He [Dante] began to write his “Divine Comedy” in his thirty fifth year. The thirty-fifth year is a turning point in life – it is an interesting fact that Christ died in his thirty-fourth year. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture VII, Page 222.
This process of active imagination is the making conscious of the material which lies on the threshold of consciousness. Consciousness is an effort and you have to sleep in order to recuperate from the task. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Volume II, Page 12.
Oh Izdubar, most powerful one, what you call poison is science. In our country we are nurtured on it from youth, and that may be one reason why we haven’t properly flourished and remain so dwarfish. When I see you, however, it seems to me as if we are all somewhat poisoned.” ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 278.
On the whole my illness proved to be a most valuable experience which gave me the inestimable opportunity of a glimpse behind the veil. The only difficulty is to get rid of the body, to get quite naked and void of the world and the ego-will. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Pages 355-357
Death is the hardest thing from the outside and as long as we are outside of it. But once inside you taste of such completeness and peace and fulfillment that you don’t want to return. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Pages 355-357.
I had still not become a man again who carried within himself the conflict between a longing for the world and a longing for the spirit. I did not live either of these longings, but I lived myself and was a merrily greening tree in a remote spring forest. And thus I learned to live without the world and spirit; and I was amazed how well I could live like this. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 277.
After all the rebirths you still remain the lion crawling on the earth, the Chameleon], a caricature, one prone to changing colors, a crawling shimmering lizard, but precisely not a lion, whose nature is related to the sun, who draws his power from within himself who does not crawl around in the protective colors of the environment, and who does not defend himself by going into hiding. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 277.
I recognized the chameleon and no longer want to crawl on the earth and change colors and be reborn; instead I want to exist from my own force, like the sun which gives light and does not suck light. That belongs to the earth. I recall my solar nature and would like to rush to my rising. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 277.
You see, somewhere our unconscious becomes material, because the body is the living unit, and our conscious and our unconscious are embedded in it: the contact the body. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 441.
The substance is always the same, but a new value is given to it, and the new value is the treasure. That is the secret of alchemy for instance. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 653.
Until now it has not truly and fundamentally been noted that our time, despite the prevalence of irreligiosity, is so to speak congenitally charged with the attainment of the Christian epoch, namely with the supremacy of the word, that Logos which the central figure of Christian faith represents. The word has literally become our God and has remained so. ~Carl Jung; Present and Future, CW 10, §554.
One needs death to be able to harvest the fruit. Without death, life would be meaningless, since the long-lasting rises again and denies its own meaning. To be, and to enjoy your being, you need death, and limitation enables you to fulfill your being. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 275.
If I accept death, then my tree greens, since dying increases life. If I plunge into the death encompassing the world, then my buds break open. How much our life needs death! ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 275.
From the middle of life, only he who is willing to die with life remains living. Since what takes place in the secret hour of life’s midday is the reversal of the parabola, the birth of death … ~Carl Jung; Soul and death, CW 8, §800.
The ego says “I will,” the self says “thou shalt.” ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 568.
We cannot do away with the living man by making him spirit-he must live here-and we must really assume that inasmuch as there is life it makes sense, and that life in not properly lived when we deny half of life. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 539.
…Wolves occasionally eat human beings if they are very hungry, but we also eat animals and by the millions, so we have absolutely no ground for blaming those animals for eating a man occasionally. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 538.
He who sleeps in the grave of the millennia dreams a wonderful dream. He dreams a primordially ancient dream. He dreams of the rising sun. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 272
The meanings that follow one another do not lie in things, but lie in you, who are subject to many changes, insofar as you take part in life. Things also change, but you do not notice this if you do not change. But if you change, the countenance of the world alters. The manifold sense of things is your manifold sense. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 273.
The self in its divinity (i.e., the archetype) is unconscious of itself. It can become conscious only within our consciousness. And it can do that only if the ego stands firm. ~Carl Jung; Letters Volume 1; 335-336.
Life inevitably leads down into reality. Life is of the nature of water: it always seeks the deepest place, which is always below in the darkness and heaviness of the earth. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 508.
You see, if you are duly initiated, you surely lose all desire to found a religion because you then know what religion really is. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 503.
The ancients called the saving word the Logos, an expression of divine reason. So much unreason / was in man that he needed reason to be saved. If one waits long enough, one sees how the Gods all change into serpents and underworld dragons in the end. This is also the fate of the Logos: in the end it poisons us all. In time, we were all poisoned, but unknowingly we kept the One, the Powerful One, the eternal wanderer in us away from the poison. We spread poison and paralysis around us in that we want to educate all the world around us into reason. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 280.
Through comprehending the dark, the nocturnal, the abyssal in you, you become utterly simple. And you prepare to sleep through the millennia like everyone else, and you sleep down into the womb of the millennia, and your walls resound with ancient temple chants. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 267.
Your heights are your own mountain, which belongs to you and you alone. There you are individual and live your very own life. If you live your own life, you do not live the common life, which is always continuing and never-ending, the life of history and the inalienable and ever-present burdens and products of the human race. There you live the endlessness of being, but not the becoming. Becoming belongs to the heights and is full of torment. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 267.
The collective unconscious is the foundation of life, the eternal truth of life, the eternal basis and the eternal goal. It is the endless sea from which life originates and into which life flows back, and it remains forever the same. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 380.
At your low point you are no longer distinct from your fellow beings. You are not ashamed and do not regret it, since insofar as you live the life of your fellow beings and descend to their lowliness you also climb into the holy stream of common life, where you are no longer an individual on a high mountain, but a fish among fish, a frog among frogs. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 266.
Incidentally-mustn’t it be a peculiarly beautiful feeling to hit bottom in reality at least once, where there is no going down any further, but only upward beckons at best? Where for once one stands before the whole height of reality? ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 265.
For what is the body? The body is merely the visibility of the soul, the psyche; and the soul is the psychological experience of the body. So it is really one and the same thing. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 355.
If ever you have the rare opportunity to speak with the devil, then do not forget to confront him in all seriousness. He is your devil after all. The devil as the adversary is your own other standpoint; he tempts you and sets a stone in your path where you least want it. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 261.
I earnestly confronted my devil and behaved with him as with a real person. This I learned in the Mysterium: to take seriously every unknown wanderer who personally inhabits the inner world, since they are real because they are effectual. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 260.
I believe I have learned that no one is allowed to avoid the mysteries of the Christian religion unpunished. I repeat: he whose heart has not been broken over the Lord Jesus Christ drags a pagan around in himself who holds him back from the best. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 260.
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.
We cannot say the side of the spirit is twice as good as the other side; we must bring the pairs of opposites together in an altogether different way, where the rights of the body are just as much recognized as the rights of the spirit. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 235.
Because I also want my being other, I must become a Christ. I am made into Christ, I must suffer it. Thus the redeeming blood flows. Through the self-sacrifice my pleasure is changed and goes above into its higher principle. Love is sighted, but pleasure is blind. Both principles are one in the symbol of the flame. The principles strip themselves of human form. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 254.
Man doesn’t only grow from within himself for he is also creative from within himself The God becomes revealed in him. Human nature is little skilled in divinity; and therefore man fluctuates between too much and too little. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 253.
Great is he who is in love, since love is the present act of the great creator, the present moment of the becoming and lapsing of the world. Mighty is he who loves. But whoever distances himself from love, feels himself powerful. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 253.
If you go to thinking, take your heart with you. If you go to love, take your head with you. Love is empty without thinking, thinking hollow without love. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 253.
But the brightness of love seems to come from the fact that love is visible life and action. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 252.
I wouldn’t call the ego a creation of mind or consciousness, since, as we know, little children talk of themselves first in the third person and begin to say ‘T’ only when they have found their ego. The ego, therefore, is rather a find or an experience and not a creation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1; Pages 254-255.
Fear is aggressivity in reverse. Consequently, the thing we are afraid of involves a task. If you are afraid of your own thoughts, then your thoughts are the task. ~Carl Jung; Letters Volume 1; Page 507.
The symbol becomes my lord and unfailing commander. It will fortify its reign and change itself into a starry and riddling image, whose meaning turns completely inward, and whose pleasure radiates outward like blazing fire, a Buddha in the flames. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 249.
To live oneself means: to be one’s own task. Never say that it is a pleasure to live oneself It will be no joy but a long suffering, since you must become your own creator. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 249.
If forethinking and pleasure unite in me, a third arises from them, the divine son, who is the supreme meaning, the symbol, the passing over into a new creation. I do not myself become the supreme meaning or the symbol, but the symbol becomes in me such that it has its substance, and I mine. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 249.
Rightness is not a category that can be applied to religion anyway. Religion consists of psychic realities which one cannot say are right or wrong. Are lice or elephants right or wrong? It is enough that they exist. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Page 327.
Schizophrenics with visions and hallucinations have a better prognosis than those who hear voices. The latter are more enslaved by the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 19.
…the fact is that free will only exists within the limits of consciousness. Beyond those limits there is mere compulsion. ~Carl Jung; Letters Volume 1, Page 227
If a complete or divine consciousness were possible, there would be no projection, which means that there would be no world, because the world is the definiteness of the divine projection. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 132.
On the one hand, emotion is the alchemical fire whose warmth brings everything into existence and whose heat burns all superfluities to ashes. But on the other hand, emotion is the moment when steel meets flint and a spark is struck forth, for emotion is the chief source of consciousness. There is no change from darkness to light or from inertia to movement without emotion”. ~Carl Jung, CW 9, Page 96.
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.
A thinker should fear Salome, since she wants his head, especially if he is a holy man. A thinker cannot be a holy person, otherwise he loses his head. It does not help to hide oneself in thought. There the solidification overtakes you. You must turn back to motherly forethought to obtain renewal. But forethought leads to Salome. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 248.
The serpent is the earthly essence of man of which he is not conscious. Its character changes according to peoples and lands, since it is the mystery that flows to him from the nourishing earth-mother. The earthly (numen loci) separates forethinking and pleasure in man, but not in itself. The serpent has the weight of the earth in itself but also its changeability and germination from which everything that becomes emerges. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 247.
Individuation is only possible with people, through people. You must realize that you are a link in a chain, that you are not an electron suspended somewhere in space or aimlessly drifting through the cosmos. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 103.
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.
The new God laughs at imitation and discipleship. He needs no imitators and no pupils. He forces men through himself The God is his own follower in man. He imitates himself. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 245.
You say: the Christian God is unequivocal, he is love. But what is more ambiguous than love? Love is the way of life, but your love is only on the way of life if you have a left and a right. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 244.
Take pains to waken the dead. Dig deep mines and throw in sacrificial gifts, so that they reach the dead. Reflect in good heart upon evil, this is the way to the ascent. But before the ascent, everything is night and Hell. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 244.
I understood that the new God would be in the relative. If the God is absolute beauty and goodness, how should he encompass the fullness of life, which is beautiful and hateful, good and evil, laughable and serious, human and inhuman? ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 243.
Day does not exist through itself, night does not exist through itself. The reality that exists through itself is day and night. So the reality is meaning and absurdity. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 242.
The meaning of events is the way of salvation that you create. The meaning of events comes from the possibility of life in this world that you create. It is the mastery of this world and the assertion of your soul in this world. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 239.
Depths and surface should mix so that new life can develop. Yet the new life does not develop outside of us, but within us. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 239.
To the extent that the Christianity of this time lacks madness, it lacks divine life. Take note of what the ancients taught us in images: madness is divine. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 238.
Keep it far from me, science that clever knower, that bad prison master who binds the soul and imprisons it in a lightless cell. But above all protect me from the serpent of judgment, which only appears to be a healing serpent, yet in your depths is infernal poison and agonizing death. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 238
So we should talk to our animus or anima….So you listen to the inner mentor, you develop the inner ear; or you write automatically, and a word is formed by your hand, or your mouth speaks that which you have not thought. ~Carl Jung, The Cornwall Seminar, Page 26.
We can never enter the collective unconscious but we can send the anima or animus to bring us information. By making things with your hands without conscious intent you find a vision of the things of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, The Cornwall Seminar, Page 26.
For untold years it has happened for the first time that I could not plant my potatoes and my corn anymore and weed has overgrown my piece of black earth, as if its owner were no more. Things and exterior life slip past me and leave me in a world of unworldly thought and in a time measured by centuries. I am glad that you and others carry on the work I once began. The world needs it badly. It seems to come to a general showdown, when the question will be settled whether the actually existing man is conscious enough to cope with his own demons or not. ~Carl Jung to Esther Harding; Letters Volume 1, Pages 468-469.
Everything that becomes too old becomes evil, the same is true of your highest. Learn from the suffering of the crucified God that one can also betray and crucify a God, namely the God of the old year. If a God ceases being the way the zenith, he must fall secretly. The God becomes sick if he oversteps the height of the zenith. That is why the spirit of the depths took me when the spirit of this time had led me to the summit. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 241.
Of course, any creation is a creations beyond oneself, because one is already in existence, and if anything is created it must be beyond. ~Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Page 49.
Whatever happens in the fantasy must happen to you. You should not let yourself be represented by a fantasy 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
Cleverness couples itself with intention. Simplemindedness knows no intention. Cleverness conquers the world, but simplemindedness, the soul. So take on the vow of poverty of spirit in order to partake of the soul. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 237.
When you say that the place of the soul is not, then it is not. But if you say that it is, then it is. Notice what the ancients said in images: the word is a creative act. The ancients said: in the beginning was the Word. Consider this and think upon it. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 236.
Psychological treatment cannot rid you of the basic facts of your nature; it can only give you the necessary insight, and only to the extent that you are capable of it. ~Carl Jung [Letters Volume 1, Page 292.]
Did you not see that when your creative force turned to the world, how the dead things moved under it and through it, how they grew and prospered, and how your thoughts flowed in rich rivers? If your creative force now turns to the place of the soul, you will see how your soul becomes green and how its field bears wonderful fruit. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 236.
The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 154.
I too was afraid, since we had forgotten that God is terrible. Christ taught: God is love. But you should know that love is also terrible. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 235.
Disorder and meaninglessness are the mother of order and meaning. Order and meaning are things that have become and are no longer becoming. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 235.
I must learn that the dregs of my thought, my dreams, are the speech of my soul. I must carry them in my heart, and go back and forth over them in my mind, like the words of the person dearest to me. Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 232.
From this we learn how the spirit of the depths considers the soul: he sees her as a living and self-existing being, and with this he contradicts the spirit of this time for whom the soul is a thing dependent on man… ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 232.
Therefore the spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 232.
But one thing you must know: the one thing I have learned is that one must live this life. This life is the way, the long sought-after way to the unfathomable, which we call divine. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 232.
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.
I have learned that in addition to the spirit of this time there is still another spirit at work, namely that which rules the depths of everything contemporary. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 229.
Who knows the way to the eternally fruitful climes of the soul? You seek the way through mere appearances; you study books and give ear to all kinds of opinion. What good is all that? There is only one way and that is your way. You seek the path. I warn you away from my own. It can also be the wrong way for you. May each go his own way. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 231
Believe me: It is no teaching and no instruction that I give you. On what basis should I presume to teach you? I give you news of the way of this man, but not of your own way. My path is not your path therefore I cannot teach you. The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws. Within us is the way, the truth, and the life. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 231.
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.
Small children are very old; later on we soon grow younger. In our middle age we are youngest, precisely at the time when we have completely or almost completely lost contact with the collective unconscious, the samskaras. We grow older again only as with the mounting years we remember the samskaras anew. ~Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Appendix 1, Page 74.
Without personal life, without the here and now, we cannot attain to the supra-personal. Personal life must first be fulfilled in order that the process of the supra-personal side of the psyche can be introduced. ~Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Page 66.
Individuation is not that you become an ego—you would then become an individualist. You know, an individualist is a man who did not succeed in individuating; he is a philosophically distilled egotist. ~Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Pages 39-40.
If you succeed in remembering yourself, if you succeed in making a difference between yourself and that outburst of passion, then you discover the self; you begin to individuate. ~~Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Pages 39-40.
The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room” ~Carl Jung; CW 13; §54.
If one could arrive at the truth by learning the words of wisdom, then the world would have been saved already in the remote times of Lao-tze. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Pages 559-560.
At all events wisdom cannot be taught by words. It is only possible by personal contact and by immediate experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Pages 559-560.
The truth is one and the same everywhere and I must say that Taoism is one of the most perfect formulations of it I ever became acquainted with. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Pages 559-560.
There are, and always have been, those who cannot help but see that the world and its experiences are in the nature of a symbol, and that it really reflects something that lies hidden in the subject himself, in his own transubjective reality. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 521, Para 859.
It is the psyche which, by the divine creative power inherent in it, makes the metaphysical assertion; it posits the distinctions between metaphysical entities. Not only is it the condition of all metaphysical reality, it is that reality. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 512, Para 856.
“Of course,” said Jung, “You know, when somebody comes to me and boasts about the great success of his latest book I look deeply into his eyes and say, ‘I hope , my friend, that this success will not harm you too much.’” ~ C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 84-85.
The Bardo Thodol began by being a “closed” book, and so it has remained, no matter what kind of commentaries may be written upon it. For it is a book that will only open itself to spiritual understanding, and this is a capacity which no man is born with, but which he can only acquire through special training and special experience. It is good that such to all intents and purposes “useless” books exist. They are meant for those “queer folk” who no longer set much store by the uses, aims, and meaning of present-day “civilization.” ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 525-526, Para 858.
He [Jung] was not especially interested in analyzing the transference, unless it was distorted by inflation, or otherwise blocking the way. He felt transference did no harm, and in face could be used as a bridge to other relations. But beware of counter-transference. ~Margaret Gildea, C.G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff -A Collection of Remembrances.
The spiritual climax is reached at the moment when life ends. Human life, therefore, is the vehicle of the highest perfection it is possible to attain; it alone generates the karma that makes it possible for the dead man to abide in the perpetual light of the Voidness without clinging to any object, and thus to rest on the hub of the wheel of rebirth, freed from all illusion of genesis and decay. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 524-525, Para 856.
We are immortalized in memory. Oh, yes, it is so. The soul has become immortal if we leave something behind for others. Psychology can affirm no other immortality. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff-A collections of Remembrances, Page 7.
There are, and always have been, those who cannot help but see that the world and its experiences are in the nature of a symbol, and that it really reflects something that lies hidden in the subject himself, in his own transubjective reality. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 521, Para 859.
The unconscious is useless without the human mind. It always seeks its collective purposes and never your individual destiny. Your destiny is the result of the collaboration between the conscious and the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Page 283.
You trust your unconscious as if it were a loving father. But it is nature and cannot be made use of as if it were a reliable human being. It is inhuman and it needs the human mind to function usefully for man’s purposes. Nature is an incomparable guide if you know how to follow her. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Page 283.
It is a primordial, universal idea that the dead simply continue their earthly existence and do not know that they are disembodied spirits an archetypal idea which enters into immediate, visible manifestation whenever anyone sees a ghost. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 518.
The archetypes are, so to speak, organs of the pre-rational psyche. They are eternally inherited forms and ideas which have at first no specific content. Their specific content only appears in the course of the individual’s life, when personal experience is taken up in precisely these forms. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 518.
The least differentiated function is always the one from which our renewal starts; it is just the one that yields the renewal of life; when a person has used up his conscious point of view, he capsizes; the thing which never has lived is as green and as fresh as spring-it means a complete reversal of the whole personality. ~ C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 51-70.
Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books. ~ C.G. Jung; Letters Volume 1; Page 179.
Numbers are autonomous. They had their life, their significance before men used them as instruments. The mathematicians continue to use them as instruments, so in that instant they become dry. Before they had their proper significance. C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 51-70.
Austerity is also in the realm of nature-the forests, the mountains-but without insistence, nature never insists on its qualities; and to do this means, in fact, to lose the quality of one’s quality. It no longer is nature, no longer natural. ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 51-70.
One must not avoid unhappiness. One must accept suffering; it is a great teacher. ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 51-70.
The fourth, that’s the devil. He is the only metaphysical person outside of the gods. Without the fourth there is no meaning. ~C.G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff-A Collection of Remembrances, Pages 51-70.
The shadow is something very evasive. I don’t know mine. I study it by the reaction of those around me. We depend on the reflection of the mirror of our entourage. When it is not good, self-criticism is in order. ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 51-70.
The fourth, that’s the devil. He is the only metaphysical person outside of the gods. Without the fourth there is no meaning. ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 51-70.
Matter is an hypothesis. When you say “matter,” you are really creating a symbol for something unknown, which may just as well be “spirit” or anything else; it may even be God. Religious faith, on the other hand, refuses to give up its pre-Weltanschauung, in contradiction to the saying of Christ, the faithful try to remain children instead of becoming as children. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 477, Para 762.
The archetype is outside of me as well as in me. ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 51-70.
Our psyche can function as though space did not exist. The psyche can thus be independent of space, of time, and of causality. This explains the possibility of magic. ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 51-70.
Children are in the collective unconscious until they acquire a small consciousness of their personality, until they say “I,” or “me,” or their name. They are rooted in the collective unconscious and are uprooted from it by the flood of impressions from the outside. They know everything, but they lose the memory of it. ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 51-70.
The psyche, which we have a tendency to take for a subjective face, is really a face that extends outside of us, outside of time, outside of space. ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 51-70.
Your individuality, your Self, appears in the objective facts of your life. An event can seem incredible, unacceptable, but if it happens to you, then it means that it is you. ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 51-70.
…the figures in the unconscious could be explained by a long-lasting primeval matriarchy if only we knew for certain that it ever existed, just as the flood myths could be explained by the myth of Atlantis if only we knew that there ever was an Atlantis. Equally, the contents of the unconscious could be explained by reincarnation if we knew that there is reincarnation. ~ Carl Jung to Baroness Tinti, Letters Volume 1, Pages 208-209.
Hermeticism is not something you choose, it is a destiny, just as the ecclesia spiritualis is not an organization but an electio. ~Carl Jung to Rudolf Bernuoelli, Letters Volume 1, Page 351.
It is of no importance whether evil is here or there, but one can deal only with the evil in oneself, because it is within one’s reach, elsewhere one trespasses. ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 51-70.
It might be said of her that she [Toni Wolff] was “Virgin” as defined for us by Esther Harding, meaning simply an unmarried woman who, since she belonged to no man, belonged to herself and to God in a special way. Toni Wolff to Sallie Nichols; C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances, Pages 47-51
Intuitives don’t have substance; they have inventiveness, imagination. They don’t complete anything. It is necessary for them to acquire this faculty. ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 51-70.
Then after a pause, Miss Wolff added this: “You know, sometimes if a man’s wife is big enough to leap over the hurdle of self-pity, she may find that her supposed rival has even helped her marriage! This ‘other woman’ can sometimes help a man live out certain aspects of himself that his wife either can’t fulfill, or else doesn’t especially want to. As a result, some of the wife’s energies are now freed for her own creative interests and development, often with the result that the marriage not only survives, but emerges even stronger than before!” ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances, Pages 47-51
There, that’s the error, one must not seek happiness. The happiness that one seeks is a usurped one. Organic happiness, the bliss that comes from the center of the earth, that alone is fruitful and that simply comes. Sometimes it surges from the deepest suffering. ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 51-70.
So it will happen to you as it happens to most people. They die in exactly the same ways as they should have lived. Good Lord, how many impersonations do you reckon you need to understand this simple truth? ~Carl Jung to J. Allen Gilbert, Letters Volume 1, Pages 422-423.
One must not avoid unhappiness. One must accept suffering; it is a great teacher. ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 51-70.
But when you die, nobody else will die for you or instead of you. It will be entirely and exclusively your own affair. That has been expected of you through your whole life, that you live it as if you were dying. So it will happen to you as it happens to most people. They die in exactly the same ways as they should have lived. ~Carl Jung to J. Allen Gilbert, Letters Volume 1, Pages 422-423.
The only people you can’t treat are those who are born without a psyche. And of these there are not a few. ~Carl Jung to Frau N; Letters Volume 1; Page 95.
It frequently happens that when a person with whom one was intimate dies, either one is oneself drawn into the death, so to speak, or else this burden has the opposite effect of a task that has to be fulfilled in real life. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Page 239.
Everything in me has arisen from direct experience of the mentally ill or “seekers after truth.” ~Carl Jung to Kurt Plachte, Letters Volume 1, Pages 59-61.
P. W. Martin, author of Experiments in Depth, used to say that the really individuated partner in the Jung couple was Mrs. Jung! ~Elined Prys Kotschnig; ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances; Page 40
The dream was of the general form of three elements being differentiated and a fourth less well developed; he elaborated at great length the problem of adding the fourth element to the existing trinity of faculties and the implications of this development. . ~Robert Johnson, C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 36-39
He said that it was not the least important whether I accomplished anything outwardly in this life since my one task was to contribute to the evolution of the collective unconscious. ~Robert Johnson, C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 36-39.
He indicated that though it was true that I was a young man, my dream was of the second half of life and was to be lived no matter what age I was. ~Robert Johnson, C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 36-39.
Two days later I was again at Kusnacht to be met at the door by the famous two dogs at the entrance to Dr. Jung’s house. I had heard that he arranged to have his two dogs meet a new patient, the dogs being more sensitive to a potential psychotic than any human observation. ~Robert Johnson, C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 36-39.
I realize that under the circumstances you have described you feel the need to see clearly. But your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Without, everything seems discordant; only within does it coalesce into unity. Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume I, Page 33.
But religious statements without exception have to do with the reality of the psyche and not with the reality of physis. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 464.
Although he is already born in the pleroma, his birth in time can only be accomplished when it is perceived, recognized, and declared by man. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Religion; Page 462; Para 748
… it would be an arbitrary limitation of the concept of God to assume that He is only good and so deprive evil of real being. If God is only good, everything is good…. ~Carl Jung, Letters II, 519
After thinking this over I have come to the conclusion that being ‘made in the likeness’ applies not only to man but also to the Creator: he resembles man or is his likeness, which is to say that he is just as unconscious as man or even more unconscious,… ~Carl Jung, Letters II, 496
God is a mystery, and everything we say about Him is said and believed by human beings… when I speak of God I always mean the image man has made of him… ~Carl Jung, Letters II, 384
I do know of a power of a very personal nature and an irresistible influence. I call it ‘God’. ~Carl Jung, Letters II, 274.
My God-image corresponds to an autonomous archetypal pattern. Therefore I can experience God as if he were an object, but I need not assume that it is the only image. ~Carl Jung, Letters II, 154.
God is an immediate experience of a very primordial nature, one of the most natural products of our mental life,…” ~Carl Jung, Letters II, 253.
God is a universal experience which is obfuscated only by silly rationalism and an equally silly theology. ~Carl Jung, Jung, Letters, II, 525.
What is remarkable about Christianity is that in its system of dogma it anticipates a metamorphosis in the divinity, a process of historic change on the “other side.” ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 327.
Not nature, but the “genius of mankind” has knotted the hangman’s noose with which it can execute itself at any moment. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 451, Para 733.
The angels are a strange genus: they are precisely what they are and cannot be anything else. They are in themselves soulless beings who represent nothing but the thoughts and intuitions of their Lord. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Pages 327-328.
Just as you become a part of the manifold essence of the world through your bodies, so you become a part of the manifold essence of the inner world through your soul. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 264.
Oh master of the garden! I see your dark tree from afar in the shimmering sun. My street leads to the valleys where men live. I am a wandering beggar. And I remain silent. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 316.
Human knowledge consists essentially in the constant adaptation of the primordial patterns of ideas that were given us a priori. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Page 49.
Great is the power of the way. In it Heaven and Hell grow together, and in it the power of the Below and the power of the Above unite. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 308.
The practice of magic consists in making what is not understood understandable in an incomprehensible manner. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 314.
Just as the disciples of Christ recognized that God had become flesh and lived among them as a man, we now recognize that the anointed of this time is a God who does not appear in the flesh; he is no man and yet is a son of man, but in spirit and not in flesh; hence he can be born only through the spirit of men as the conceiving womb of the God. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 300.
Is there anyone among you who believes he can be spared the way? Can he swindle his way past the pain of Christ? I say: “Such a one deceives himself to his own detriment. He beds down on thorns and fire. No one can be spared the way of Christ, since this way leads to what is to come. You should all become Christs. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 235.
But the supreme meaning is the path the way and the bridge to what is to come. That is the God yet to come. It is not the coming God himself but his image which appears in the supreme meaning. God is an image, and those who worship him must worship him in the images of the supreme meaning. The supreme meaning is not a meaning and not an absurdity, it is image and force in one, magnificence and force together. The supreme meaning is the beginning and the end. It is the bridge of going across and fulfillment. Carl Jung, The Red Book, Pages 229-230.
The divine primordial power is blind, since its face has become human. The human is the face of-the Godhead. If the God comes near you, then plead for your life to be spared, since the God is loving horror. The ancients said: it is terrible to fall into the hands of the living God. They spoke thus because they knew, since they were still close to the ancient forest, and they turned green like the trees in a childlike manner and ascended far away toward the East. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 281.
Some have their reason in thinking, others in feeling. Both are servants of Logos, and in secret become worshipers of the serpent. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 280.
I had to recognize that I am only the expression and symbol of the soul. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 234.
The spirit of this time of course allowed me to believe in my reason. He let me see myself in the image of a leader with ripe thoughts. But the spirit of the depths teaches me that I am a servant, in fact the servant of a child: This dictum was repugnant to me and I hated it. But I had to recognize and accept that my soul is a child and that my God in my soul is a child. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 234.
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.
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.
We need the coldness of death to see clearly. Life wants to live and to die, to begin and to end. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 275.
The God of words is cold and dead and shines from afar like the moon, mysteriously and inaccessibly: Let the word return to its creator, to man, and thus the word will be heightened in man. Man should be light, limits, measure. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 271.
Magic is the working of men on men, but your magic action does not affect your neighbor; it affects you first, and only if you withstand it does an invisible effect pass from you to your neighbor. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 308.
The moon is dead. Your soul went to the moon, to the preserver of souls. Thus the soul moved toward death. I went into the inner death and saw that outer dying is better than inner death. And I decided to die outside and to live within. For that reason I turned away and sought the place of the inner life. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 267.
Where reason abides one needs no magic. Hence our time no longer needs magic. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 314.
Only those remain living who are willing to die with life. Since what happens in the secret hour of the midday of life is the reversal of the parabola, the birth of death. ~Carl Jung, The soul and death, CW 8, § 800.
The soul possesses in some degree a historical stratification, whereby the oldest stratum of which would correspond to the unconscious. ~Carl Jung. CW8, § 51.
Magic is a way of living. If one has done one’s best to steer the chariot, and one then notices that a greater other is actually steering it, then magical operation takes place. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 314.
The ancients devised magic to compel fate. They needed it to determine outer fate. We need it to determine inner fate and to find the way that we are unable to conceive. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 311.
Joy at the smallest things comes to you only when you have accepted death. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 275.
Every man has a quiet place in his soul, where everything is sel-evident and easily explainable, a place to which he likes to retire from the confusing possibilities of life, because there everything is simple and clear, with a manifest and limited purpose. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 295.
When I comprehended my darkness, a truly magnificent night came over me and my dream plunged me into the depths of the millennia, and rom my phoenix ascended. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 274.
To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 266
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.
When the God enters my lie, I return to my poverty for the sake o God. I accept the burden of poverty and bear all my ugliness and ridiculousness, and also everything reprehensible in me. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 303.
He who cannot bear doubt does not bear himself. Such a one is doubtful; he does not grow and hence he does not live. Doubt is the sign of the strongest and the weakest. The strong have doubt, but doubt has the weak. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 301.
This tangible and apparent world is one reality, but fantasy is the other reality: So long as we leave the God outside us apparent and tangible, he is unbearable and hopeless. ~ Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 283.
We should not bear Christ as he is unbearable, but we should be Christs, for then our yoke is sweet and our burden easy. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 283.
The outer opposition is an image of my inner opposition. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 279.
All your rebirths could ultimately make you sick. The Buddha therefore finally gave up on rebirth, for he had had enough of crawling through all human and animal forms. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 277.
The spirit of this time has condemned us to haste. You have no more futurity and no more past if you serve the spirit of this time. We need the life of eternity. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 253.
The earthly (numen loci) separates forethinking and pleasure in man, but not in itself. The serpent has the weight of the earth in itself but also its changeability and germination from which everything that becomes emerges. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 237.
My soul: “Who gives you thoughts and words? Do you make them? Are you not my serf a recipient who lies at my door and picks up my alms? And you dare think that what you devise and speak could be nonsense? Don’t you know yet that it comes from me and belongs to me?” ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 241.
Life does not come from events, but from us. Everything that happens outside has already been. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 239.
The soul has its own peculiar world. Only the self enters in there, or the man who has completely become his self, he who is neither in events, nor in men, nor in his thoughts. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, 240.
But how can I attain the knowledge of the heart? You can attain this knowledge only by living your life to the full. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 233.
Dreams pave the way for life, and they determine you without your understanding their language. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 233.
He whose desire turns away from outer things, reaches the place of the soul. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 233.
My friends, it is wise to nourish the soul, otherwise you will breed dragons and devils in your heart. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 232.
Instinct is anything but a blind and indefinite impulse, since it proves to be attuned and adapted to a definite external situation. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Page 49.
Just as the chaotic movements of the crowd, all ending in mutual frustration, are impelled in a definite direction by a dictatorial will, so the individual in his dissociated state needs a directing and ordering principle. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Pages 43-44.
Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself. I fully realize that this proposition must sound well-nigh unintelligible to the man of today. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Page 43.
People go on blithely organizing and believing in the sovereign remedy of mass action, without the least consciousness of the fact that the most powerful organizations can be maintained only by the greatest ruthlessness of their leaders and the cheapest of slogans. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Page 40.
A million zeroes joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but the fatally shortsighted habit of our age is to think only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hands of a single madman. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Page 39.
Were not the autonomy of the individual the secret longing of many people, this hard-pressed phenomenon would scarcely be able to survive the collective suppression either morally or spiritually. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Page 34.
. If the psyche must be granted an overriding empirical importance, so also must the individual, who is the only immediate manifestation of the Psyche. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Page 34.
The carrier of this consciousness is the individual, who does not produce the psyche on his own volition but is, on the contrary, pre-formed by it and nourished by the gradual awakening of consciousness during childhood. ~Carl Jung, The undiscovered Self, Page 34.
Thus the psyche is endowed with the dignity of a cosmic principle, which philosophically and in fact gives it a position coequal with the principle of physical being. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Page 33.
Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and consciously expressed by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Page 33
The structure and physiology of the brain furnish no explanation of the psychic process. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Page 33.
It would also be the task of the confessor zealous in the cure of souls, were it not that his office inevitably obliges him to apply the yardstick of his denominational bias at the critical moment. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Page 37.
If you want to go to heaven, your feet will grow into hell. ~Carl Jung, Cornwall Seminar, Page 12.
…people deny the findings of parapsychology outright, either for philosophical reasons or from intellectual laziness. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Page 33.
…Man is an enigma to himself. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Page 31.
Archetypes, in spite of their conservative nature, are not static but in a continuous dramatic flux. Thus the self as a monad or continuous unit would be dead. But it lives inasmuch as it splits and unites again. There is no energy without opposites! Source: Jung’s letter to a father. This is unavoidable, for consciousness can keep only a few images in full clarity at one time, and even this clarity fluctuates. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 20.
Aside from normal forgetting . . . several cases that involve the “forgetting” of disagreeable memories . . . memories that one is only too ready to lose. As Nietzsche remarked, where pride is insistent enough, memory prefers to give way. Thus, among the lost memories, we encounter not a few that owe their subliminal state . . . to their disagreeable and incompatible nature. The psychologist calls these repressed contents. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 22.
The ability to reach a rich vein of such material, and to translate it effectively . . . is commonly called genius. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 25.
. . . I simply want to point out that the capacity of the human psyche to produce such new material is particularly significant when one is dealing with the dream symbolism . . . ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 26.
. . . dreams are difficult to understand . . . a dream is quite unlike a story told by the conscious mind. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 27.
Fortunately, we have not lost these basic instinctive strata; they remain part of the unconscious, even though they may express themselves only in the form of dream images. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 36.
The universal hero myth always refers to a powerful man or god-man who vanquishes evil in the form of dragons, serpents, monsters, demons, and so on, and who liberates his people from destruction and death. The narration or ritual repetition of sacred texts and ceremonies, and the worship of such a figure with dances, music, hymns, prayers, and sacrifices, grip the audience with numinous emotions and exalt the individual to an identification with the hero. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 68.
Goethe’s Faust aptly says: “in the beginning was the deed”.” “Deeds” were never invented, they were done; thoughts, on the other hand, are a relatively late discovery of man. First he was moved to deeds by unconscious factors; it was only a long time afterward that he began to reflect upon the causes that had moved him; and it took it him a very long time indeed to arrive at the preposterous idea that he must have moved himself . . . his mind being unable to identify any other motivating force than his own. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 70.
When the fire has burnt all that should be burnt, the balanced people of common sense naturally settle down and control the fiery ones because they are a nuisance. Yet the fire remains alive in certain people, eg. Meister Eckhart whose teaching lay dormant for six hundred years. Around Eckhart grew up a group of Brethren of the Free Spirit who lived licentiously. The problem we face is: “Is analytical psychology in the same boat?” “Are the second generation like the Brethren of the Free Spirit?” If so, it is the open way to Hell, and analytical psychology has come too soon and it will have to wait for a century or two. ~Carl Jung, The Cornwall Seminar, Page 20.
Where one is identified with the collective unconscious, there is no recognition of the things which come from the unconscious, they cannot be distinguished from those of the self. Such a condition is a possession by the anima or animus. Possession by the animus or anima creates a certain psychological hermaphroditism. The principle of individuation demands a dissociation or differentiation of the male and the female in ourselves. We must dissociate our self from the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Cornwall Seminar, Page 26.
Before my illness I had often asked myself if I were permitted to publish or even speak of my secret knowledge. I later set it all down in Aion. I realized it was my duty to communicate these thoughts, yet I doubted whether I was allowed to give expression to them. During my illness I received confirmation and I now knew that everything had meaning and that everything was perfect. . ~ Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 68.
. . . inner motives spring from a deep source that is not made by consciousness and is not under its control. In the mythology of earlier times, these forces were called mana, or spirits, demons, and gods. They are as active today as ever. If they go against us, then we say that it is just bad luck, or that certain people are against us. The one thing we refuse to admit is that we are dependent upon “powers” that are beyond our control. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 71.
The problem of my destiny goes back a hundred and fifty years. Indeed it appeared as early as the twelfth century, as I have now discovered. Formerly I believed it only went back to Goethe’s Faust. (Jung now told the dream of his ancestors in which the last was only able to move his little finger.) The problem that appeared as a question in the twelfth century became my extremely personal destiny. Already Goethe had found an answer a hundred and fifty years ago. My father was so tormented by it that he died at the age of fifty-four. ~ Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 67.
I suffer from the fact that I can so seldom have a conversation with an adequate partner. The women in my circle understand me, but for women their home, their husband, and their children, come first. Only when this is all taken care of, does a woman still have a little time for the spirit; then it is interesting. Talking with a man, on the other hand, I get a response from the cosmic spheres of the spirit. ~ Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 67.
When the new revelation has lost its life, it means that the fire has devoured all the old wood of the past, then there still remains the Institution or Church (Ecclesia means Society). Thus what we call Church may have the form of any Society, e.g. for amusement, etc. Ecclesia means a gathering of people for any common purpose. ~Carl Jung; Cornwall Seminar; Page 19.
The Catacombs: Many rich women went; it became a sort of fashion to join in this mystery cult. The mysteries were celebrated underground because of their nature, rather than on account of the persecution. Fashion molded many things in the early Church, for example, the form of the robes; the Church hood was worn to denote that we were all one, of the same standing. ~Carl Jung, Cornwall Seminar, Page 19.
Fanaticism is due to an unconscious doubt threatening the conscious attitude. For example, dogmatism is merely to protect a creed against an unrecognized doubt. True conviction needs nothing of the sort. Fanaticism is due to a threatened conviction. ~Carl Jung, Cornwall Seminar, Page 18.
The Animals. We appreciate them much more. We think of the psychology of animals. In the 19th century they made laws for their protection, and began to treat them more decently, but it is only in recent years that we begin to think of a few animals as our brothers. ~Carl Jung, Cornwall Seminar, Page 21.
Paradise, here, means the new impersonal attitude that is needed. The white magician cannot find the keys, because the way that seemed to be the wrong way led into the right way; for they needed the completion of things. ~Carl Jung; Cornwall Seminar; Page 26.
The repressed libido for animal relationship is living in the unconscious. It appears in dreams either as animals; or we appear as having animal reactions, for example, the panic fear of animals; or we have inhibited movements due to being in water, a racial memory; also many flying dreams are really swimming. ~Carl Jung; Cornwall Seminar; Page 23.
The primitives say the real scale of values begins with the elephant, lion, eagle, perhaps cobra, then man and monkey. They recognize the fact that man is one of the animals. To say that man is on top is megalomaniac. ~Carl Jung; Cornwall Seminar; Page 24.
The getting away from the respect for brother animal begets in us the animal. A man is only human when he is accompanied by brother animal. He is only individual in relationship to other individuals. ~Carl Jung; Cornwall Seminar; Page 23.
At the Reformation two things happened which upset the absolute attitude of that day: (a) Crucifixes were found in Mexico, which undermined the belief in the uniqueness of the Christian religion where the crucifixion was the central teaching, (b) The rediscovery of Gnosticism, the Dionysian myth and so forth, which showed that teachings similar to Christianity had been prevalent before the birth of Christ. ~Carl Jung; Cornwall Seminar; Page 15.
Relationships must be fostered as far as possible and maintained, and thus a morbid transference can be avoided. ~Carl Jung; Cornwall Seminar; Page 5.
Introvert and Extrovert: The introvert discovers the possibility of being extroverted in the transference. The extrovert draws back on himself; he will become aware of the possibility of experiencing himself. The introvert discovers himself by learning the possibility of pouring himself out to the analyst. It is a discovery of his unconscious. ~Carl Jung; Cornwall Seminar; Page 8.
In states of excitement we speak to ourselves as though to an excited horse, that bit is the part possessed by the anima. In a woman the animus is multiform so that he cannot be nailed down so well as the anima. ~Carl Jung, Cornwall Seminar, Page 27.
Collective relationships must be based on individual relationships, for an individual cannot exist without relatedness, for we are each cells in an organism. When we make individual relationships we lay the foundations for an invisible church. ~Carl Jung, Cornwall Seminar, Page 20.
With the archetype of the anima, we enter the realm of the gods, or rather, the realm that metaphysics has reserved for itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 9, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, Page 28
It is good to be old in years for it often looks as if we were arriving at the end of the history of our world; or at least that it will get terribly dark before the light can shine again and make it possible to see clearly. ~ Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 67.
This light dwells in the “square inch” or in the “face”, that is between the eyes. It is the visualization of the “creative point.” ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Alchemical Studies, Page 25.
The circulation is not merely movement in a circle, but means on the one hand the marking off of the sacred precinct, and on the other, the fixation and concentration. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Alchemical Studies, Page 25.
In the Middle Ages the flight to the spiritual world was still necessary. It was meaningful then to want to live spiritually and give little attention to the material, for meaning was directed towards the spirit. But it is meaningful today to want to descend with dignity to the chthonic world. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 47.
. By “Thy Will” one person may mean only what his unconscious dictates, while another may disregard all his thoughts and aspirations and fatalistically accept all that happens in his outer life. To some people we must say, “You must choose your own way; you must act.” Others have to learn to refrain from acting. Few take both into account, which is why Deus et home is so important.” ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 39.
Superman is an inflated ego and a disappearing self. He lacks the spark. What would the rainbow be if it had no dark cloud behind it? ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 63.
It seems to me that we are at the end of an era. The splitting of the atom and the nuclear bomb bring us a new view of matter. As physical man cannot develop any further, it would seem that this particular evolution ends with man. Like the caterpillar dissolves and turns into a butterfly, it is conceivable that the physical body of man could change into a more subtle body. It might not be necessary for him to die to be clothed afresh and be transformed. ? ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 63.
Schizophrenics with visions and hallucinations have a better prognosis than those who hear voices. The latter are more enslaved by the unconscious. ? ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 63.
A concrete image is a manifestation requiring space in which the spirit clothes itself in the material in order to draw to man. Images and numbers are doors through which the spiritual can reach man. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 60.
When I say as a psychologist , that God is an archetype, I mean by that the “type” in the psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 14.
The announcement of an important truth, even with the best of intentions, can lead to an extraordinary mess. That was the fate of Prometheus. It is therefore important to husband dangerous material very carefully so that first graders do not get hold of dynamite. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 59.
Analysts and mathematicians both consider themselves infallible; they live with invisible magic cloaks around them. They are both concerned with archetypes . Archetypes are living powers; they are the “thoughts of God.” ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 59.
The scientist is prejudiced by reason which acts to hide the world from him. Reality does not lie in statistical averages but in exceptions. There are events which do not obey statistical laws but only those of probability. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 59.
The articles of faith of science are: space, time and causality. The fourth is missing and rejected: the pleroma. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 59.
The I Ching can change me, if I have the patience to meditate. It is like a wine of noble vintage. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 56.
It is possible to participate in the unconscious with other persons, with animals and even with objects, through an unconscious abaissement du niveau mental. Connection is made and something may happen. I may, for example, verbalize what the other person intended saying. But even the clouds, or a glass, can reflect the inner psychic situation. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 51.
Matter may be stimulated by the inner psychic process, understood archetypally, to produce something analogous. A latent tension, for example, can manifest itself in creaking wood. Matter plays along with the psychic process. There is a story that says that when Mohammed ascended into Heaven the stone in the Temple of Jerusalem wanted to go too. The archetype manifests itself in the outer world as sympathia. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 51.
. Darwin’s idea was discovered in different places simultaneously; it corresponds to a certain pattern in the unconscious. There are indeed many strange and extraordinary natural laws. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 51.
We should be particularly watchful when synchronous events occur for a numen is then in sight. In a certain mood one notices that the crows fly towards the left. When an archetypal event approaches the sphere of consciousness, it also manifests itself in the outer life. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 51
Synchronous events are widely accepted in Chinese philosophy and are the basis of astrology. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 51.
When someone is under a grave threat, and the archetypes are constellated, synchronistic situations can arise — events that are independent of him, existing in the outside world. ~ Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 51.
A marriage is more likely to succeed if the woman follows her own star and remains conscious of her wholeness than if she constantly concerns herself with her husband’s star and his wholeness. ~ Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 51.
Christ said of Peter who disavowed him, “On this rock I will build my Church.” It is a psychological fact that someone who is disloyal or a liar can be capable of uttering the truth to an extent that we cannot fore see. ~ Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 47.
He who wishes to take the Kingdom of Heaven by storm, to conquer and eradicate evil by force, is already in the hands of evil. ~ Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 47.
The words of the Bible and the sayings of Christ are paradox. We too must be paradox, for only then do we live our lives, only then do we reach completeness and integration of our personalities. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 40.
Psychologically the God concept includes every idea of the ultimate, of the first or the last, of the highest or lowest. The name makes no difference. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 44.
God wanted to become man and still wants to … ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Answer to Job, Page 455.
One should make clear to one self, what it means, when God becomes man. ~ Carl Jung, CW 11, Answer to Job, Page 401.
If we say “God”? we give an expression to an image or verbal concept which has undergone many changes in the course of time. … ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Answer to Job, Page 360.
If there were no imperfections, no primordial defect in the ground of creation, why should there be any urge to create , any longing that must be fulfilled? ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 32.
Christianity itself would never have spread through the pagan world with such astonishing rapidity, had its ideas not found an analogous psychic readiness to receive them. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Answer to Job, Page 441.
But in omniscience there had existed from all eternity a knowledge of the human nature of God or the divine nature of man. This realization is a millennial process. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Answer to Job, Page 402.
However we may picture the relationship between God and soul, one thing is certain: The soul cannot be “nothing but. ” On the contrary it has the dignity of an entity endowed with consciousness of a relationship to Deity. Even if it were only the relationship of a drop of water to the sea … ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 10.
What does this mean for humanity? What does it mean to say that man dies yet only the risen still live? All these questions may become actual during the next two thousand years, in the era of Aquarius. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 43.
If the Nazis had invaded Switzerland during the Second World War, I would have become a Catholic out of protest because the Catholic Church would then have represented the only spiritual power. That is, of course, if I had not been shot first. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 45.
Evil is that which obstructs meaningful vitality. It may show itself differently in each case. That which is above by reason of its charity, suppresses that, which is below; then the lower craves what is above. . ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 47.
Instead of saying, “God is beyond good and evil,” we can say, “Life is both good and evil.” ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 40.
We can only speak of the relativity of good and evil in individual cases. The categories of good and evil cannot be suspended; they are continually alive and cannot be attached to material things. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 47.
Some examples of editorial slips made by the Church in the Bible:
“Ye will be as gods!”
“When thou art alone then I am with thee.”
“If thou would ‘st pray enter into thy chamber …”
The parable of the unjust steward. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 45.
The Kingdom of Heaven is a primordial condition like Paradise, but it is later in time and cannot be reached by regressing, only be going forward. We do not know whether our present order is final. At another level a new creative solution may be required. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 39.
So long as religion is only faith and outward form, the religion’s function is not experienced in our souls, nothing of any importance has happened. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 12.
When someone says, in the words of the “Our Father, ” “Thy will be done,” we must find out, if he is capable of taking both the inside and the outside, the ego and the world, into account. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 36.
A religious life presupposes a conscious connection of the inner and outer worlds and it requires a constant, meticulous attention to all circumstances to the best of our knowledge and our conscience. We must watch what the gods ordain for us in the outer world, but as well as waiting for developments in the outer world we must listen to the inner world; both worlds are expressions of God. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 36.
I want to make clear, that by the term “religion” I do not mean creed. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Psychology and Religion, Page 30.
Dogma represents the soul more completely than a scientific theory, for the latter gives expression to and formulates the conscious mind alone. ~Carl Jung, CW8, Psychology and Religion, Page 46.
God has a longing for man and it seems there is provision for God to be created in man’s consciousness. Consciousness is the cradle of the birth of God in man. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 39.
When we say “Our Father,” the Father also symbolizes that self which is hidden in Heaven, in the unconscious. The Son (Christ) is the consciously achieved self. The Holy Spirit is the Paraclete promised by Christ in the Words “Ye are as gods,” or “Greater things will be done by you.” ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 35.
I do not know whether Karma creates the ego or the ego creates Karma. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 43.
The inner man has access to the sense organs of God. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 39.
… something which existed before the ego and is in fact its father or creator. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Transformation of Symbolism of the Mass, Page 263.
The self which includes me includes many others also. For the unconscious that is conceived in our minds does not belong to me and is not peculiar to me, but is everywhere. It is the quintessence of the individual and at the same time the collective. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Paracelsus, Page 182.
We would call the self a multiple consciousness in God, or a spiritual Olympus, or an inner firmament. Paracelsus already knew this and wrote it for us. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 36.
Primitive man was much more governed by his instincts than are his “rational” modern descendants, who have learned to “control” themselves. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 36.
The guilty man is eminently suitable and therefore chosen to become the vessel for the continuing incarnation, not the guiltless one who holds aloof from the world and refuses his tribute to life, for in him the dark God would find no room. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Answer to Job, Page 460.
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making darkness conscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, The Philosophical Tree, Page 264.
The realization of the shadow is the growing awareness of the inferior part of the personality. ~Carl Jung, CW 8; On the Nature of the Psyche, Page 208.
The self is the light of the world; it is the full realization of everything in consciousness. Every animal and every plant is a representation of the self… Thus the whole world enters consciousness. ~ Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 36.
The self is the light of the world; it is the full realization of everything in consciousness. Every animal and every plant is a representation of the self… Thus the whole world enters consciousness. ~ Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 36.
A saying of the alchemist is, “God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” The saying holds for God, for the anima mundi and for the soul of man. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 35.
The ego is the workshop where the self is made. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 35.
It is normal for a man to resist his anima, because she represents the unconscious and all those tendencies and contents hitherto excluded from conscious life. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 75.
If the encounter with the shadow is the “apprentice piece” in the individual development, then, that with the anima is the “masterpiece.” ~Carl Jung, CW 9, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, Page 29.
On a low level the animus is an inferior Logos, a caricature of the differentiated masculine mind, just as on a low level the anima is a caricature of the feminine Eros. ~Carl Jung, Commentary Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 41.
For the son, the animus is hidden in the dominating power of the mother and sometimes she leaves him with a sentimental attachment that lasts throughout life and seriously impairs the fate of the adult. ~Carl Jung, CW 9, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, Page 29.
The animus is the masculine thinking in a woman. ~ Carl Jung, CW 13, The Philosophical Tree; Page 267.
Like every archetype, the animus has a Janus face. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, The Philosophical Tree; Page 268.
When a woman realizes her shadow the animus can be constellated. If the shadow remains in the unconscious the animus possesses her through the shadow. When she realizes her animus, mystical generation can occur. Sarah was Abraham’s legitimate wife, but Hagar, the dark one, had the procreative animus. Out of darkness the light is born. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 30.
When a woman realizes her shadow the animus can be constellated. If the shadow remains in the unconscious the animus possesses her through the shadow. When she realizes her animus, mystical generation can occur. Sarah was Abraham’s legitimate wife, but Hagar, the dark one, had the procreative animus. Out of darkness the light is born. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 30.
A woman is oriented towards the animus because it is the son of the unknown father, the Old Sage, whom she never comes to know. This motive is hinted at in the Gnostic texts where Sophia in her madness loves the Great Father On the other hand a man does not know the mother of the anima. She may be personified, for example, in Sophia or the seven times veiled Isis. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 30.
Hildegard von Bingen transcended the animus; that is one woman’s service to the spirit. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 30.
When the woman experiences the mystery of creativeness in herself, in her own inner world, she is doing the right thing and then no longer demands it from the outside — from her husband, her son, or anyone else close to her. . ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 29.
There is no difference in intelligence level between those who tend to have dreams and those who have visions. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Psychotherapy, Page 19.
To a man the anima is the Mother of God who gives birth to the Divine Child. To a woman the animus is the Holy Spirit, the procreator. He is at once the light and the dark God — not the Christian God of Love who contains neither the Devil nor the Son. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung; Pages 31-32.
The animus which is not realized by the mother is like a part of a soul with a relative existence of its own. . ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 29.
A particle split off from the mohter’s animus can enter her children and act like an evil spirit. As soon as the mother integrates this animus side of her soul, her children are freed. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 29.
We can only become real by accepting our sexuality and not denying it through saintliness. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 25.
We should not try to escape upward or downward from the world. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 25.
The best protection against abandonment to demons is a conscious relationship to a close, living human being. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 25.
The power operating through the animus emanates specifically from the self, which is hidden behind it, and from its mana. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 29.
The meaning of sin is that it teaches humility; the Church says, felix culpa. ~Carl Jung; Conversations with C.G. Jung, Archetypes of the Shadow, Page 29.
An archetype is composed of an instinctual factor and a spiritual image. ~Carl jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Archetypes; Page 21.
Archetypes are not matters of faith; we can know that they are there. ~Carl Jung; Conversations with C.G. Jung; Archetypes; Page 21.
The archetype signifies that particular spiritual reality which cannot be attained unless life is lived in consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Archetypes, Page 21.
Archetypes are images in the soul that represent the course of one’s life. ~Carl Jung; Conversations with C.G. Jung; Archetypes; Page 21.
There is no difference in intelligence level between those who tend to have dreams and those who have visions. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Psychotherapy, Page 19.
The insane do not stop up their ears so as not to hear the inner voices; rather they do it to close off the outside and so be better able to hear their own voices. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Psychotherapy, Page 17.
Everyone in the world is crying out to be accepted. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Psychotherapy, Page 16.
Psychology is a preparation for death. We have an urge to leave life at a higher level than the one at which we entered. ~Carl Jung; Conversations with C.G. Jung, Psychotherapy, Page 16.
A certain amount of suffering and unhappiness is our lot and no one can escape all the dark phases of life. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 14.
It is a very real help to find an expression that combines and satisfies the demands of the inner and outer worlds, the unconscious and the conscious. That is the achievement of the so called transcendent function. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Psychotherapy, Page 19.
Am I a combination of the lives of these ancestors and do I embody these lives again? Have I lived before in the past as a specific personality, and did I progress so far in that life that I am now able to seek a solution? I do not know. Buddha left the question open, and I like to assume that he himself did not know with certainty. In the meantime it is important to ensure that I do not stand at the end with empty hands. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Pages 317-318.
As therapists we are subject to the unavoidable destinies of our patients. ~Carl Jung; Conversations with C.G. Jung, Psychotherapy, Page 113.
It is the role of religious symbols to give meaning to the life of man. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols.
The unity of these two, life and consciousness, is the Tao. ~Carl Jung; The Secret of the Golden Flower.
Whenever the creative force predominates, human life is ruled and molded by the unconscious as against the active will, and the conscious ego is swept along on a subterranean current, being nothing more than a helpless observer of events.” Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Pages 168-171.
There is so much that fills me: plants, animals, clouds, day and night, and the eternal in man. The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 359.
I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation of something I do not know. In spite of all uncertainties, I feel a solidity underlying all existence and a continuity in my mode of being. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 358.
In knowing ourselves to be unique in our personal combination – that is, ultimately limited – we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then! ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 325.
Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent and our beauty. The more that man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 325
Attainment of consciousness is culture in the broadest sense, and self-knowledge is therefore the heart and essence of the process. The Oriental attributes unquestionably divine significance to the self, and according to the Christian view self-knowledge is the road to knowledge of God. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Pages 324-325
Certain souls, I imagine, feel the state of three-dimensional existence to be more blissful than that of Eternity. But perhaps that depends upon how much of completeness or incompleteness they have taken across with them from their human existence. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 321.
Am I a combination of the lives of these ancestors and do I embody these lives again? Have I lived before in the past as a specific personality, and did I progress so far in that life that I am now able to seek a solution? I do not know. Buddha left the question open, and I like to assume that he himself did not know with certainty. In the meantime it is important to ensure that I do not stand at the end with empty hands. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Pages 317-318.
To Western man, the meaninglessness of a merely static universe is unbearable. He must assume that it has meaning. The Oriental does not need to make this assumption; rather, he himself embodies it. Whereas the Occidental feels the need to complete the meaning of the world, the Oriental strives for the fulfilment of the meaning in man, stripping the world and existence from himself (Buddha). ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 317.
I would say that both are right. Western man seems predominantly extraverted, Eastern man predominantly introverted. The former projects the meaning and considers that it exists in objects; the latter feels the meaning in himself. But the meaning is both within and without. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 317.
These fantasy-images undoubtedly have their closest analogues in mythological types. We must therefore assume that they correspond to certain collective (and not personal) structural elements of the human psyche…. These cases are so numerous that we are obliged to assume the existence of a collective psychic substratum. I have called this the collective unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 9I, para. 262.
Abstraction is an activity pertaining to the psychological functions in general. There is an abstract thinking, just as there is abstract feeling, sensation, and intuition. Abstract thinking singles out the rational, logical qualities of a given content from its intellectually irrelevant components. Abstract feeling does the same with a content characterized by its feeling-values . . . . Abstract sensation would be aesthetic as opposed to sensuous sensation, and abstract intuition would be symbolic as opposed to fantastic intuition. ~Carl Jung; “Definitions,” CW 6, par. 678.
Affects occur usually where adaptation is weakest, and at the same time they reveal the reason for its weakness, namely a certain degree of inferiority and the existence of a lower level of personality. On this lower level with its uncontrolled or scarcely controlled emotions one . . . [is] singularly incapable of moral judgment. ~Carl Jung; The Shadow,” Aion, CW 9ii, par. 15.
The psychological trouble in neurosis, and the neurosis itself, can be formulated as an act of adaptation that has failed. ~Carl Jung; CW 4; par. 574.
Man is not a machine in the sense that he can consistently maintain the same output of work. He can meet the demands of outer necessity in an ideal way only if he is also adapted to his own inner world, that is, if he is in harmony with himself. Conversely, he can only adapt to his inner world and achieve harmony with himself when he is adapted to the environmental conditions. ~Carl Jung; “On Psychic Energy,” CW 8; par. 75.
The constant flow of life again and again demands fresh adaptation. Adaptation is never achieved once and for all. ~Carl Jung; “The Transcendent Function,” CW 8, par. 143.
Before [individuation] can be taken as a goal, the educational aim of adaptation to the necessary minimum of collective norms must first be attained. If a plant is to unfold its specific nature to the full, it must first be able to grow in the soil in which it is planted. ~Carl Jung; “Definitions,” CW 6, par. 761.
I visualize the process of abstraction as a withdrawal of libido from the object, as a backflow of value from the object into a subjective, abstract content. For me, therefore, abstraction amounts to an energic devaluation of the object. In other words, abstraction is an introverting movement of libido. ~Carl Jung; CW 4; par. 679.
The belief, the self-confidence, perhaps also the devotion with which the analyst does his work, are far more important to the patient (imponderabilia though they may be), than the rehearsing of old traumata. ~Carl Jung; CW 4; par. 584.
The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm which is not easily disturbed, or else a brokenness that can hardly be healed. Conversely, it is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed in order to produce valuable and lasting results. ~Carl Jung; The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche.
Common is the view that spirit and psyche are essentially the same and can be separated only arbitrarily. Wundt takes spirit as “the inner being, regardless of any connection with an outer being. ~ Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 386
Although we human beings have our own personal life, we are in large measure the representatives, the victims and promoters of a collective spirit whose years are counted in centuries. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 91.
I have always advised analysts: “Have a father confessor, or a mother confessor!” Women are particularly gifted for playing such a part. They often have excellent intuition and critical insight, and can see what men have up their sleeves, at times see also into men’s anima intrigues. They see aspects that the man does not see. That is why no woman has ever been convinced that her husband is a superman! ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 134.
Then, to my intense confusion, it occurred to me that I was actually two different persons. One of them was the schoolboy who could not grasp algebra and was far from sure of himself; the other was important, a high authority, a man not to be trifled with, as powerful and influential as a manufacturer. The ‘other’ was an old man who lived in the eighteenth century, wore buckled shoes and a white wig and went driving in a fly with high, concave rear wheels between which the box was suspended on springs and leather straps. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Pages 33-34.
Leaving aside the rational arguments against any certainty in these matters, we must not forget that for most people it means a great deal to assume that their lives will have an indefinite continuity beyond their present existence. They live more sensibly, feel better, and are more at peace. One has centuries, one has an inconceivable period of time at one’s disposal. What then is the point of this senseless mad rush? ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 301.
A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. They then dwell in the house next door, and at any moment a flame may dart out and set fire to his own house. Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 277.
Spirit has the further connotation of sprightliness, when we say that a person is “spirited,” meaning that he is versatile and full of ideas, with a brilliant, witty, and surprising turn of mind.~ Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 386.
A very widespread view conceives spirit as a higher and psyche as a lower principle of activity, and conversely the alchemists thought of spirit as the ligamentum animae et corporis, regarding it as a spiritus vegetativus (the later life-spirit or nerve-spirit). ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 386.
The collective unconscious is common to all; it is the foundation of what the ancients called the ‘sympathy of all things’. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 138.
Myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings… But religion is a vital link with psychic processes independent of and beyond consciousness, in the dark hinterland of the psyche. ~Carl Jung CW 9i, para. 261.
I do not know for what reason the universe has come into being, and shall never know. Therefore I must drop this question as a scientific or intellectual problem. But if an idea about it is offered to me – in dreams or in mythic traditions – I ought to take note of it. I even ought to build up a conception on the basis of such hints, even though it will forever remain a hypothesis that I know cannot be proved. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Pages 301-302.
Others restrict spirit to certain psychic capacities or functions or qualities, such as the capacity to think and reason in contradistinction to the more “soulful” sentiments. Here spirit means the sum-total of all the phenomena of rational thought, or of the intellect, including the will, memory, imagination, creative power, and aspirations motivated by ideals. ~ Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 386.
Thus we remain ignorant of whether our ancestral components find an elementary gratification in our lives, or whether they are repelled. Inner peace and contentment depend in large measure upon whether or not the historical family which is inherent in the individual can be harmonized with the ephemeral conditions of the present. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 237.
The word “spirit” possesses such a wide range of application that it requires considerable effort to make clear to oneself all the things it can mean. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 385.
In the dream, … there are numberless inter-connections to which one can find parallels only in mythological associations of ideas (or perhaps in certain poetic creations which are often characterized by a borrowing, not always conscious, from myths. ~Carl Jung; CW 9I; para. 259.
It was then that I dedicated myself to service of the psyche. I loved it and hated it, but it was my greatest wealth. My delivering myself over to it, as it were, was the only way by which I could endure my existence and live it as fully as possible. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 192.
First, fantasies (including dreams) of a personal character, which go back unquestionably to personal experiences, things forgotten or repressed, and can thus be completely explained by individual anamnesis. Second, fantasies (including dreams) of an impersonal character, which cannot be reduced to experiences in the individual’s past, and thus cannot be explained as something individually acquired. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i
The indefinite extent of the unconscious component makes a comprehensive description of the human personality impossible. Accordingly, the unconscious supplements the picture with living figures ranging from the animal to the divine, as the two extremes outside man, and rounds out the animal extreme, through the addition of and inorganic abstractions, into a microcosm. These addenda have a high frequency in anthropomorphic divinities, where they appear as “attributes.” ~Carl Jung; Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 314-315
The Catholic Church is liberal enough to look upon the Osiris-Horus-Isis myth, or at any rate suitable portions of it, as a prefiguration of the Christian legend of salvation. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Paragraph 178.
Any theological treatment of the devil that is not related to God’s trinitarian consciousness is a falsification of the actual position. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Paragraph 103.
Any theological treatment of the devil that is not related to God’s trinitarian consciousness is a falsification of the actual position. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Paragraph 103.
What youth found and must find outside, the man of life’s afternoon must find within himself. ~Carl Jung; “Two Essays on Analytical Psychology”, 1917
As a rule, whenever such a falsification of type takes place . . . the individual becomes neurotic later, and can be cured only by developing the attitude consonant with his nature. ~Carl Jung; “General Description of the Types,” par. 560.
[Visions] are like dreams, only they occur in the waking state.” ~Carl Jung; “The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Sprits”, 1920
We do not work with the “transference to the analyst,” but against it and in spite of it. ~Carl Jung; “Some Crucial Points in Psychoanalysis,” CW 4, par. 601.
Conscious and unconscious are not necessarily in opposition to one another, but complement one another to form a totality, which is the self. ~Carl Jung; from “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious”, 1928.
The unconscious [at times] produces contents which are valid not only for the person concerned, but for others as well, in fact for a great many people and possible for all. ~Carl Jung; “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious”, 1928.
Any attempt to create a spiritual attitude by splitting off and suppressing the instincts is a falsification. Nothing is more repulsive than a furtively prurient spirituality; it is just as unsavory as gross sensuality. … Both [spirituality and sensuality] must live, each drawing life from the other.” ~Carl Jung; “Marriage as a Psychological Relationship”, 1925.
The more a man’s life is shaped by the collective norm, the greater is his individual immorality. ~Carl Jung; “Psychological Types”, 1921.
Since the relation of the ego to the self is like that of the son to the father, we can say that when the Self calls on us to sacrifice ourselves, it is really carrying out the sacrificial act on itself. ~Carl Jung; “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass.”; CW 11; Par 398.
The more intelligent and cultured a man is, the more subtly he can humbug himself. ~Carl Jung; “Analytical Psychology and Education”, 1924.
Archetypes are complexes of experience that come upon us like fate, and their effects are felt in our most personal life. The anima no longer crosses our path as a goddess, but, it may be, as an intimately personal misadventure, or perhaps as our best venture. When, for instance, a highly esteemed professor in his seventies abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress, we know that the gods have claimed another victim. ~Carl Jung; “Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious”; CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Page 62.
One can easily throw dust into one’s own eyes with theories. ~Carl Jung; “Analytical Psychology and Education”, 1924.
He [the teacher] has already learned that the emptiest head, parroting a method which can well be the best student. His whole environment speaks and lives there in front of him, all that success and happiness is outside and that one needed only the right method to achieve what you want. Carl Jung; CW 6.
The people would never have been Deutsch taken in and carried away so completely if this figure had not been a reflected image of the collective hysteria Deutsch. Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Collected Works 18, par. 1400 .
The primitives I observed in East Africa took it for granted that “big” dreams are dreamed only by “big” men – medicine-men, magicians, chiefs, etc. This may be true on a primitive level. But with us these dreams are dreamed also by simple people, more particularly when they have got themselves, mentally or spiritually, in a fix. ~Carl Jung; “The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man”; CW 10: Civilization in Transition. Page 324.
The Catholic who has turned his back on the Church usually develops a secret or manifest leaning towards atheism, whereas the Protestant follows, if possible, a sectarian movement. The absolutism of the Catholic Church seems to demand an equally absolute negation, whereas Protestant relativism permits of variations. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Paragraph, 34.
Be prepared to accept the view that spirit is not absolute, but something relative that needs completing and perfecting through life. –Carl Jung; “Spirit and Life” CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. Page 645.
Every advance, every conceptual achievement of mankind, has been connected with an advance in self-awareness: man differentiated himself from the object and faced Nature as something distinct from her. Any reorientation of psychological attitude will have to follow the same road. ~Carl Jung; “General Aspects of Dream Psychology”; CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. Page 523.
An exclusively sexual interpretation of dreams and fantasies is a shocking violation of the patient’s psychological material: infantile-sexual fantasy is by no means the whole story, since the material also contains a creative element, the purpose of which is to shape a way out of the neurosis. ~Carl Jung; “The Therapeutic Value of Abreaction,” CW 16, par. 277.
There is no recrossing the Rubicon. ~Carl Jung; “Individual Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy”, 1935.
Medical treatment of the transference gives the patient a priceless opportunity to withdraw his projections, to make good his losses, and to integrate his personality. ~Carl Jung; The Psychology of the Transference,” CW 16, par. 420.
The capacity for directed thinking I call intellect; the capacity for passive or undirected thinking I call intellectual intuition. ~Carl Jung; “Definitions” Ibid. par. 832.
To ask the right question is already half the solution of a problem. ~Carl Jung; The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1934.
The tendencies of the conscious and the unconscious are the two factors that together make up the transcendent function. It is called “transcendent” because it makes the transition from one attitude to another organically possible. ~Carl Jung; The Transcendent Function, CW 8, par. 145.
Sentimentality is the superstructure erected upon brutality. ~Carl Jung; Ulysses: A Monologue.
The dreams of redemption, whereby God descends into the human realm and man mounts up to the realm of divinity. ~Carl Jung; “A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity”, 1942.
In [the Middle Ages] they spoke of the devil, today we call it a neurosis. ~Carl Jung; “The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man”, 1933.
The descent into the depths always seems to precede the ascent. ~Carl Jung; “The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious”, 1934.
We also live in our dreams, we do not live only by day. Sometimes we accomplish our greatest deeds in dreams. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book. Page 242.
Just as man was once revealed out of God, so, when the circle closes, God may be revealed out of man. ~Carl Jung; A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity”, 1942.
Nature, the psyche, and life appear to me like divinity unfolded – and what more could I wish for? To me the supreme meaning of Being can consist only in the fact that it is, not that it is not or is no longer. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections
The longing for light is the longing for consciousness. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Chapter 9.
There is no consciousness without discrimination of opposites. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i: 178/
What is stirred in us is that faraway background, those immemorial patterns of the human mind, which we have not acquired but have inherited from the dim ages of the past. ~Carl Jung; “The Structure of the Psyche”; CW 8: 315.
. . . man brings with him at birth the ground-plan of his nature. . . . ~Carl Jung; CW 4: 728.
Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices. ~Carl Jung; “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry”; CW 15: 129.
The woman is increasingly aware that love alone can give her full stature, just as the man begins to discern that spirit alone can endow his life with its highest meaning. Fundamentally, therefore, both seek a psychic relation to the other, because love needs the spirit, and the spirit love, for their fulfillment. ~Carl Jung; Contributions to Analytical Psychology; Page 185.
We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 110.
Reason alone does not suffice. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 98.
It is astounding that man, the instigator, inventor and vehicle of all these developments, the originator of all judgments and decisions and the planner of the future must make himself such a quantité negligeable. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 45.
`Even if the whole world were to fall to pieces, the unity of the psyche would never be shattered. And the wider and more numerous the fissures on the surface, the more the unity is strengthened in the depths. ~Carl Jung; Civilization in Transition (1964)
The little world of childhood with its familiar surroundings is a model of the greater world. The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon the child, the more it will tend to feel and see its earlier miniature world again in the bigger world of adult life. Naturally this is not a conscious, intellectual process. ~Carl Jung; The Theory of Psychoanalysis (1913).
Yahweh [God] must become man precisely because he has done man a wrong. He, the guardian of justice, knows that every wrong must be expiated, and Wisdom knows that moral law is above even him. Because his creature has surpassed him he must regenerate himself. ~Carl Jung; Book of Job; Para. 640.
The invasion of evil signifies that something previously good has turned into something harmful . . . the ruling moral principle, although excellent to begin with, in time loses its essential connection with life, since it no longer embraces life’s variety and abundance. What is rationally correct is too narrow a concept to grasp life in its totality and give it permanent expression. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Religion; Answer to Job.
These images are naturally only anticipations of a wholeness which is, in principle, always just beyond our reach. Also, they do not invariably indicate a subliminal readiness on the part of the patient to realize that wholeness consciously, at a later stage; often they mean no more than a temporary compensation of chaotic confusion.[The Psychology of the Transference,” ~Carl Jung; CW 16, par. 536.
. . . The development of consciousness is the burden, the suffering, and the blessing of humankind. ~Carl Jung; 1955.
Dreams are often anticipatory and would lose their specific meaning on a purely causalistic view. They afford unmistakable information about the analytical situation, the correct understanding of which is of the greatest therapeutic importance. ~Carl Jung; “The Practical Use of Dream Analysis” CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy; Page 312.
So long as the self is unconscious, it corresponds to Freud’s superego and is a source of perpetual moral conflict. If, however, it is withdrawn from projection and is no longer identical with public opinion, then one is truly one’s own yea and nay. The self then functions as a union of opposites and thus constitutes the most immediate experience of the Divine that it is psychologically possible to imagine. ~Carl Jung; “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass”; CW 11, par. 396.
Every sacrifice is . . . to a greater or lesser extent a self-sacrifice. The degree to which it is so depends on the significance of the gift. If it is of great value to me and touches my most personal feelings, I can be sure that in giving up my egoistic claim I shall challenge my ego personality to revolt. I can also be sure that the power that suppresses this claim, and thus suppresses me, must be the self. Hence it is the self that causes me to make the sacrifice; nay more, it compels me to make it . The self is the sacrificer, and I am the sacrificed gift, the human sacrifice. ~Carl Jung; “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass”; CW 11, par. 397.
The term “self” seems a suitable one for the unconscious substrate whose actual exponent in consciousness is the ego. The ego stands to the self as the moved to the mover, or as object to subject, because the determining factors that radiate outward from the self surround the ego on all sides and are therefore supraordinate to it. The self, like the unconscious, as an a priori existent out of which the ego evolves. It is, so to speak, an unconscious prefiguration of the ego. It is not I who create myself; rather, I happen to myself ~Carl Jung; “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass”; CW 11, par. 391.
The difference between the “natural” individuation process, which runs its course unconsciously, and the one that is consciously realized is tremendous. In the first case, consciousness nowhere intervenes; the end remains as dark as the beginning. In the second case, so much darkness comes to light that the personality is permeated with light and consciousness necessarily gains in scope and insight. The encounter between conscious and unconscious has to ensure that the light that shines in the darkness is not only comprehended by the darkness, but comprehends it (from “Answer to Job” in CW 11, par. 756).
Insofar as this process [of individuation], as a rule, runs its course unconsciously as it has from time immemorial, it means no more than that the acorn becomes an oak, the calf a cow, and the child an adult. But if the individuation process is made conscious, consciousness must confront the unconscious and a balance between the opposites must be found . ~Carl Jung; “Answer to Job”; CW 11, par. 755.
As a totality, the self is by definition always a complexio oppositorum [union of opposites], and the more consciousness insists on its own luminous nature and lays claim to moral authority, the more the self will appear as something dark and menacing. ~Carl Jung; “Answer to Job”; CW 11, par. 716.
The self is defined psychologically as the psychic totality of the individual. Anything that a [person] postulates as being a greater totality than [oneself] can become a symbol of the self. For this reason the symbol of the self is not always as total as the definition would require. ~Carl Jung; “A Psychological Approach to the Trinity”; CW 11, par. 232.
And Gerhard Dorn cries out, “Transform yourselves into living philosophical stones!” There can hardly be any doubt that not a few of those seekers had the dawning knowledge that the secret nature of the stone was man’s own self. This “self” was evidently never thought of as an entity identical with the ego, and for this reason it was described as a “hidden nature” dwelling in inanimate matter, as a spirit, daemon, or fiery spark. By means of the philosophical opus, . . . this entity was freed from darkness and imprisonment, and finally it enjoyed a resurrection. . . . It is clear that these ideas can have nothing to do with the empirical ego, but are concerned with a “divine nature” quite distinct from it, and hence, psychologically speaking, with a consciousness-transcending content issuing from the realm of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung; “Psychology and Religion” in CW 11, par. 154.
[From an early treatise]: “Thus it [the stone] comes from man, and you are its mineral (raw material); in you it is found and from you it is extracted . . . and it remains inseparably in you” ~Carl Jung; “Psychology and Religion”; CW 11, par. 53
This process of becoming human is represented in dreams and inner images as the putting together of many scattered units, and sometimes as the gradual emergence and clarification of something that was always there. The speculations of alchemy, and also of some Gnostics, revolve around this process. It is likewise expressed in Christian Dogma, and more particularly in the transformation mystery of the Mass. ~Carl Jung; “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass”; CW 11, par. 399.
The spiritual man says to the worldly man, “Are you capable of knowing your soul in a complete manner? If you knew it, as is fitting, and if you knew what makes it better, you would be able to recognize that the names the philosophers formerly gave it are not its true names. . . . O dubious names that resemble the true names, what errors and agonies you have provoked among men!” The names refer in turn to the philosopher’s stone. . . . ~Carl Jung; “Psychology and Religion”; CW 11, par. 153.
The old natural philosophers . . . said that the miraculous substance, whose essential nature they symbolized by a circle divided into four parts, was man himself (Carl Jung; “Psychology and Religion”; CW 11, par. 153). One might almost say that man himself, or his innermost soul, is the prisoner or the protected inhabitant of the mandala (Carl Jung; “Psychology and Religion”; CW 11, par. 157).
It is a figure comparable to Hiranyagarbha, Purusha, Atman, and the mystic Buddha. For this reason I have elected to call it the “self,” by which I understand a psychic totality and at the same time a centre, neither of which coincides with the ego but includes it, just as a larger circle encloses a smaller one. ~Carl Jung, CW 9I, 247.
Because of its unconscious component the self is so far removed from the conscious mind that it can only be partially expressed by human figures; the other part of it has to be expressed by objective, abstract symbols. The human figures are father and son, mother and daughter, king and queen, god and goddess…. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 314-315.
[The alchemist Gerhard] Dorn . . . says, “In the body of man there is hidden a certain substance of heavenly nature known to very few ~Carl Jung; “Psychology and Religion” in CW 11, page 93, note 47.
The sun… is the only truly ‘rational’ image of God, whether we adopt the standpoint of the primitive savage or of modern science. In either case the sun is the father-god from whom all living things draw life; he is the fructifier and creator, the source of energy for our world. The discord into which the human soul has fallen can be harmoniously resolved through the sun as a natural object which knows no inner conflict. ~Carl Jung; CW 5; Symbols of Transformation; Para 176.
The world hangs on a thin thread, and that thread is the psyche of man. ~Carl Jung; “Conversations with Carl Jung, and Reactions from Ernest Jone” by Richard I. Evans.
The final factors at work in us are nothing other than those talents which “a certain nobleman” entrusted to his “servants,” that they might trade with them (Luke 19:12 ff.). It does not require much imagination to see what this involvement in the ways of the world means in the moral sense. Only an infantile person can pretend that evil is not at work everywhere, and the more unconscious s/he is, the more the devil drives her/him. . . . Only ruthless self-knowledge o the widest scale, which sees good and evil in correct perspective and can weigh up the motives of human action, offers some guarantee that the end result will not turn out too badly ~Carl Jung; CW 9/2, par. 255.
It is of the greatest importance that the ego should be anchored in the world of consciousness and that consciousness should be reinforced by a very precise adaptation. For this, certain virtues like attention, consciousness, patience, etc., are of the greatest value on the moral side, just as accurate observation of the symptomatology of the unconscious and objective self-criticism are valuable on the intellectual side. ~Carl Jung; CW 9/2, par. 46.
Nature must not win the game, but she cannot lose. ~Carl Jung; “Alchemical Studies, 1942.
Psychological truths are not metaphysical insights; they are habitual modes of thinking, feeling, and behaving that experience has proved appropriate and useful. ~Carl Jung; CW 9/2, par. 50.
This subjective knowledge of the self [is what is meant by]: “No one can know himself unless he knows what, and not who, he is, on what he depends, or whose he is (or to whom or what he belongs) and for what end he was made.” This distinction . . . is crucial. . . . Not the subjective ego-consciousness of the psyche is meant, but the psyche itself as the unknown, unprejudiced object that still has to be investigated. . . . “What” refers to the neutral self, the objective fact of totality, since the ego is on the one hand causally “dependent on” or “belongs to” it, and on the other hand is directed toward it as to a goal ~Carl Jung; CW 9/2, par. 252.
The shadow, the syzygy, and the Self are psychic factors of which an adequate picture can be formed only on the basis of a fairly thorough experi-ence of them. Just as these concepts arose out of an experience of reality, so they can be elucidated only by further experience ~Carl Jung; CW 9/2, par. 63.
We find the crucial importance of self-knowledge [for the sake of the transformation process] expressed most clearly [by the alchemist Dorn]. . . . The transformation is brought about by the conjunctio, which forms the essence of the work. ~Carl Jung; CW 9/2, par. 256.
The right time comes when one is ready. ~Carl Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff: A Collection of Remembrances” edited by Ferme Jensen.
[One of my patients] dreamed that she was commanded to descend into “a pit filled with hot stuff.” This she did, till only one shoulder was sticking out of the pit. Then Jung came along, pushed her right down into the hot stuff, exclaiming “Not out but through. ~Carl Jung; from “From the Life and Work of C. G. Jung” by Aniela Jaffe.
We know only a small part of our psyches. The causal factors determining [one’s] psychic existence reside largely in the unconscious processes outside consciousness , and in the same way there are final factors at work in [one] that likewise originate in the unconscious. . . . Causes and ends thus transcend consciousness to a degree that ought not to be underestimated, and this implies that their nature and action are unalterable and irreversible [to the degree that] they have not become objects of consciousness. They can only be corrected through conscious insight and moral determination, which is why self-knowledge, being so necessary, is feared so much ~Carl Jung; CW 9/2, par. 253.
The Brahmans to look upon the fire both as the subject and the object of a sacrifice. The fire embraced the offering, and was thus a kind of priest; it carried it to the gods, and was thus a kind of mediator between gods and men. But the fire represented also something divine, a god to whom honour was due, and thus it became both the subject and the object of the sacrifice. Hence the idea that Agni sacrifices himself, that he offers a sacrifice to himself, and likewise that he offers himself as a sacrifice” ~Carl Jung; CW 5.
We are the manner in which the Lord is born. ~Carl Jung; “A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity”, 1942.
The arcane substance is one and the same, whether it is found within man or outside him. ~Carl Jung [citing Gerhard Dorn; Aion; Para 249.
Whenever contents of the collective unconscious become activated, they have a disturbing effect on the conscious mind, and contusion ensues. If the activation is due to the collapse of the individual’s hopes and expectations, there is a danger that the collective unconscious may take the place of reality. This state would be pathological. If, on the other hand, the activation is the result of psychological processes in the unconscious of the people, the individual may feel threatened or at any rate disoriented, but the resultant state is not pathological, at least so far as the individual is concerned. Nevertheless, the mental state of the people as a whole might well be compared to a psychosis. “The Psychological Foundation for the Belief in Spirits (1920). ~Carl Jung; CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.595.
The greater the tension, the greater is the potential. Great energy springs from a correspondingly great tension of opposites. ~Carl Jung; “Alchemical Studies”, 1942.
The union of opposites on a higher level of consciousness is not a rational thing, nor is it a matter of will; it is a process of psychic development that expresses itself in symbols. Carl Jung; Collected Works 13; Alchemical Studies; Page 16.
The whole nature of man presupposes woman, both physically and spiritually. His system is tuned into woman from the start, just as it is prepared for a quite definite world where there is water, light, air, salt, carbohydrates etc…~Carl Jung; “Two Essays in Analytical Psychology”; CW 7: Page 188.
There are analysts who believe that they can get along without self-analysis. This is Munchausen psychology, and they will certainly remain stuck. They forget that one of the most important therapeutically effective factors is subjecting you to the objective judgment of another. As regards ourselves we remain blind, despite everything and everybody. Carl Jung; “The Theory of Psychoanalysis”; CW 4: Freud and Psychoanalysis; Page 449.
As a doctor it is my task to help the patient to cope with life. I cannot presume to pass judgment on his final decisions, because I know from experience that all coercion-be it suggestion, insinuation, or any other method of persuasion-ultimately proves to be nothing but an obstacle to the highest and most decisive experience of all, which is to be alone with his own self, or whatever else one chooses to call the objectivity of the psyche. The patient must be alone if he is to find out what it is that supports him when he can no longer support himself. Only this experience can give him an indestructible foundation. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Alchemy; CW 12: Page 32.
The patient is there to be treated and not to verify a theory. For that matter, there is no single theory in the whole field of practical psychology that cannot on occasion be proved to be basically wrong. In particular, the view that the patient’s resistances are in no circumstances) justified is completely fallacious. The resistance might very well prove that the treatment rests on false assumptions. ~Carl Jung; “Fundamental Questions of Psychotherapy”; CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy; Page 237.
Alchemy has performed for me the great and invaluable service of providing material in which my experience could find sufficient room, and has thereby made it possible for me to describe the individuation process at least in its essential aspects. ~Carl Jung; Mysterium Coniunctionis; Paragraph 792.
Naturally, every age thinks that all ages before it were prejudiced, and today we think this more than ever and are just as wrong as all previous ages that thought so. How often have we not seen the truth condemned! It is sad but unfortunately true that man learns nothing from history. ~Carl Jung; Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle; Page 33.
Why is psychology the youngest of the empirical sciences? Why have we not long since discovered the unconscious and raised up its treasure-house of eternal images? Simply because we had a religious formula for everything psychic — and one that is far more beautiful and comprehensive than immediate experience. Though the Christian view of the world has paled for many people, the symbolic treasure-rooms of the East are still full of marvels that can nourish for a long time to come the passion for show and new clothes. What is more, these images — are they Christian or Buddhist or what you will — are lovely, mysterious, and richly intuitive. ~Carl Jung; The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious; Pages 7-8.
The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy any creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. It is therefore short-sighted to treat fantasy, on account of its risky or unacceptable nature, as a thing of little worth. ~Carl Jung; Psychological Types Ch. 1; Page 82.
It is hard to believe that this teeming world is too poor to provide an object for human love – it offers boundless opportunities to everyone. It is rather the inability to love which robs a person of these opportunities. The world is empty only to him who does not know how to direct his libido towards things and people, and to render them alive and beautiful. What compels us to create a substitute from within ourselves is not an external lack, but our own inability to include anything outside ourselves in our love. Certainly the difficulties and adversities of the struggle for existence may oppress us, yet even the worst conditions need not hinder love; on the contrary, they often spur us on to greater efforts. Carl Jung; Symbols of Transformation (1952). CW 5: Page 253.
It should be someone already has a much clouded vision or view of a very hazy distance, the human society, if he thinks that by uniform regulation of life an equal distribution of happiness could be achieved. ~Carl Jung; CW 6.
The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers. – ~Carl Jung; Mysterium Coniunctionis; “Return to the Simple Life” In CW 18; Page 56.
In sleep, fantasy takes the form of dreams. But in waking life, too, we continue to dream beneath the threshold of consciousness, especially when under the influence of repressed or other unconscious complexes. ~Carl Jung; “Problems of Modern Psychotherapy” (1929). In CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy; Page 125.
As soon as people get together in masses and submerge the individual, the shadow is mobilized, and, as history shows, may even be personified and incarnated. Carl Gustav Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Collected Works, 9i, par.478
In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order. ~Carl Jung; “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” vol. 9, pt. 1, Collected Works, ed. William McGuire (1959).
Nature is often obscure or impenetrable, but she is not, like man, deceitful. We must therefore take it that the dream is just what it pretends to be, neither more nor less. If it shows something in a negative light, there is no reason for assuming that it is meant positively. ~Carl Jung; “On the Psychology of the Unconscious” (1953). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology; Page 162.
Only the mystics bring religion to what is creative itself. Carl Gustav Jung [LC 540]
A political situation is the manifestation of a parallel psychological problem in millions of individuals. This problem is largely unconscious (which makes it a particularly dangerous one!) ~Carl Gustav Jung, Letters, vol.1 pg. 535.
Love . . . is of fundamental importance in human life and . . . of far greater significance than the individual suspects. ~Carl Jung; “On the Psychology of the Unconscious”; CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Page 14; Page 218.
Our psychology is a science . . . Plenty of unqualified persons are sure to push their way in and commit the greatest follies . . . Our aim is simply and solely scientific knowledge . . . If religion and morality are blown to pieces in the process, so much the worse for them . . . Knowledge is a force of nature that goes its way irresistibly from inner necessity. ~Carl Jung; Essay Included in CW 18; Page 314.
The psychological rule says that when the intra situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided [not in touch with both the light AND dark parts of themselves] and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must by force act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves. ~Carl Jung, Collected Works 9ii, par.126, Christ, A Symbol of the Self.
The goal of the individuation process is the synthesis of the self. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i; Page 278.
God of God […] one God, from whom you did not know, because people forgot about him. We call him by name Abraxas .He is still indefinite as God and Devil. ~Carl Jung; Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, 1916.
The danger that faces us today is that the whole of reality will be replaced by words. This accounts for that terrible lack of instinct in modern man, particularly the city-dweller. He lacks all contact with life and the breath of nature. He knows a rabbit or a cow only from the illustrated paper, the dictionary, or the movies, and thinks he knows what it is really like-and is then amazed that cowsheds “smell,” because the dictionary didn’t say so. ~Carl Jung; “Good and Evil in Analytical Psychology” (1959); CW 10: Civilization in Transition; Page 882.
Of course, thinks every time, all previous times had been biased, and now we think it more than ever, and has therefore just as wrong as all the previous times, thought so. How often have you experienced it, that the truth has been condemned? It’s sad but unfortunately true, that man learns nothing from history. This fact will cause us the most trouble, because when we are about in such dark somehow enlightened one thing to collect empirical data, we will find it quite sure where all the authorities have assured us that nothing could be found. ~Carl Jung; Synchronicity acausality and occultism, dtv Verlag, Munich, 1990.
The dream shows the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as he would like it to be, but as it is. ~Carl Jung; “The Practical Use of Dream Analysis” (1934). In CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy; Page 304.
The dream is specifically the utterance of the unconscious. Just as the psyche has a diurnal side which we call consciousness, so also it has a nocturnal side: the unconscious psychic activity which we apprehend as dreamlike fantasy. ~Carl Jung; “The Practical Use of Dream Analysis” (1934). In CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy; Page 317.
The immunity of the nation depends entirely upon the existence of a leading minority immune to the evil and capable of combating the powerful suggestive effect. ~Carl Gustav Jung, The Symbolic Life, Collected Works 18, par.1400
The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals .In our most private and most subjective lives, we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch. Carl Gustav Jung, The Symbolic Life, Collected Works 18, par.1400
Nothing exerts a stronger psychic effect upon the environment, and especially upon children, than the [unlived] life [of] the parents. ~Carl Jung; “Paracelsus”, 1929.
All religions are therapies for the sorrows and disorders of the soul.” ~Carl Jung; “Commentary to The Secret of the Golden Flower”, 1929.
More especially the threat to one’s inmost self from dragons and serpents points to the danger of the newly acquired consciousness being swallowed up again by the instinctive psyche, the unconscious. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i; para. 282.
His uncertainty forces the enthusiast to puff up his truths, of which he feels none too sure, and to win proselytes to his side in order that his followers may prove to himself the value and trustworthiness of his own convictions. … Only when convincing someone else does he feel safe from gnawing doubts? ~Carl Jung; The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious”, 1928)
[Life’s greatest problems] can never by solved but only outgrown. ~Carl Jung; “Commenary to The Secret of the Golden Flower”, 1929.
Without freedom there can be no morality. ~Carl Jung; “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious”, 1928.
To translate meaning into life … is to realize the Tao. ~Carl Jung; “Commentary to The Secret of the Golden Flower”, 1929.
Our fearsome gods have only changed their names: they now rhyme with—ism. ~Carl Jung; “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious”, 1928.
Identification with one’s office or one’s title is very attractive. … In vain would one look for a personality behind the husk. Underneath the entire padding one would find a very pitiable little creature. That is why the office-or whatever this outer husk may be-is so attractive: it offers easy compensation for personal deficiencies. ~Carl Jung; “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious”, 1928.
No one can make history who is not willing to risk everything for it, to carry the experiment with his own life through to the bitter end, and to declare that his life is not a continuation of the past but a new beginning. ~Carl Jung; “Woman in Europe”, 1927.
Since society as a whole needs the magically effective figure, it uses the needful will to power in the individual, and the will to submit in the mass, as a vehicle, and thus brings about the creation of personal prestige. ~Carl Jung; “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious”, 1928.
By understanding the unconscious we free ourselves from its domination. ~Carl Jung; “Commentary to The Secret of the Golden Flower”, 1929.
To establish a really mature attitude, he has to see the subjective value of all these images which seem to create trouble for him. He has to assimilate them into his own psychology; he has to find out in what way they are part of himself; how he attributes for instance a positive value to an object, when as a matter of fact it is he who could and should develop this value. And in the same way, when he projects negative qualities and therefore hates and loathes the object, he has to discover that he is projecting his own inferior side, his shadow, as it were, because he prefers to have an optimistic and one-sided image of himself. ~Carl Jung; [Definitions,” CW 6, par. 813.]
The part of the unconscious which is designated as the subtle body becomes more and more identical with the functioning of the body, and therefore it grows darker and darker and ends in the utter darkness of matter. . . . Somewhere our unconscious becomes material, because the body is the living unit, and our conscious and our unconscious are embedded in it: they contact the body. Somewhere there is a place where the two ends meet and become interlocked. And that is the [subtle body] where one cannot say whether it is matter, or what one calls “psyche.” ~Carl Jung; Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, vol. 1, p. 441.
The “supraordinate personality” is the total man, i.e., man as he really is, not as he appears to himself. . . . I usually describe the supraordinate personality as the “self,” thus making a sharp distinction between the ego, which, as is well known, extends only as far as the conscious mind, and the whole of the personality, which includes the unconscious as well as the conscious component. The ego is thus related to the self as part to whole. To that extent the self is supraordinate. ~Carl Jung; The Psychological Aspects of the Kore,” CW 9i, pars. 314f.
Free will is doing gladly and freely that which one must do. ~Carl Jung; “C. G.Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff: A Collection of Remembrances” edited by Ferme Jensen.
It seems to be very hard for people to live with riddles or to let them live, although one would think that life is so full of riddles as it is that a few more things we cannot answer would make no difference. But perhaps it is just this that is so unendurable, that there are irrational things in our own psyche which upset the conscious mind in its illusory certainties by confronting it with the riddle of its existence. ~Carl Jung; “The Philosophical Tree” (1945); CW 13: Alchemical Studies; Page 307.
I call every interpretation which equates the dream images with real objects an interpretation on the objective level… Interpretation on the objective level is analytic, because it breaks down the dream content into memory-complexes that refer to external situations. ~Carl Jung; CW 7, para. 131.
Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it. It may help us to escape all criticism; we may even be able to deceive ourselves in the belief of our obvious righteousness. But deep down, below the surface of the average man’s conscience, he hears a voice whispering, “There is something not right,” no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or by the moral code. ~Carl G. Jung, in the introduction to Frances G. Wickes’ “Analysis der Kinderseele” (The Inner World of Childhood), 1931.
In contrast to this is the interpretation which refers every part of the dream and all the actors in it back to the dreamer himself. This I call interpretation on the subjective level…. Interpretation on the subjective level is synthetic, because it detaches the underlying memory-complexes from their external causes, regards them as tendencies or components of the subject, and reunites them with that subject. ~Carl Jung; CW 7, para. 131.
Our dreams are continually saying things beyond our conscious comprehension. We have intimations and intuitions from unknown sources. Fears, moods, plans, and hopes come to us with no visible causation. These concrete experiences are at the bottom of our feeling that we know ourselves very little; at the bottom, too, of the painful conjecture that we might have surprises in store for ourselves.~Carl Jung; Aion; CW 9i para. 299.
Emptiness is a great feminine secret. It is something absolutely alien to man; the chasm, the unplumbed depths, the yin. The pitifulness of this vacuous nonentity goes to his heart (I speak here as a man), and one is tempted to say that this constitutes the whole “mystery” of woman. Such a female is fate itself. A man may say what he likes about it; be for it or against it, or both at once; in the end he falls, absurdly happy, into this pit, or, if he does not, he has missed and bungled his only chance of making a man of himself. In the first case one cannot disprove his foolish good luck to him, and in the second one cannot make his misfortune seem plausible. “The Mothers, the Mothers, how eerily it sounds!” ~Carl Jung; “Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype” (1939); CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.183
Take for comparison the daily course of the sun-but a sun that is endowed with human feeling and man’s limited consciousness. In the morning it rises from the nocturnal sea of unconsciousness and looks upon the wide, bright world which lies before it in an expanse that steadily widens the higher it climbs in the firmament. In this extension of its field of action caused by its own rising, the sun will discover its significance; it will see the attainment of the greatest possible height, and the widest possible dissemination of its blessings, as its goal. In this conviction the sun pursues its course to the unforeseen zenith-unforeseen, because its career is unique and individual, and the culminating point could not be calculated in advance. At the stroke of noon the descent begins. And the descent means the reversal of all the ideals and values that were cherished in the morning. – “The Stages of Life” (1930). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche.
We must constantly bear in mind that what we mean by “archetype” is in itself irrepresentable, but has effects which make visualizations of it possible, namely, the archetypal images and ideas. We meet with a similar situation in physics: there the smallest particles are themselves irrepresentable but have effects from the nature of which we can build up a model. The archetypal image, the motif or mythologem, is a construction of this kind. ~Carl Jung; “On the Nature of the Psyche” (1947). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.417.
The archetype or primordial image might suitably be described as the instinct’s perception of itself, or as the self portrait of the instinct, in exactly the same way as consciousness is an inward perception of the objective life-process. ~Carl Jung; “Instinct and the Unconscious” (1919). CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche P.277.
Yahweh is both just and unjust, kindly and cruel, truthful and deceitful. ~Carl Jung; “A Psychological View of Conscience”, 1958.
Conscience itself [asserts] that it is a voice of God. ~Carl Jung; “Civilization in Transition”, 1958.
Everything living strives for wholeness. ~Carl Jung; “On the Nature of Dreams,”1945.
Within each one of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from how we see ourselves. When, therefore, we find ourselves in a difficult situation, to which there is no solution, he can sometimes kindle a light that radically alters our attitude, the very attitude that led us into the difficult situation. ~Carl Jung; “Civilization in Transition”, 1958.
The dream may either repudiate the dreamer in a most painful way, or bolster him up morally. The first is likely to happen to people who … have too good an opinion of themselves; the second to those whose self-valuation is too low. ~Carl Jung; “On the Nature of Dreams,”1945.
We . . . can become dissociated and lose our identity. We can be possessed . . . by moods, or become unreasonable, so that people ask: “What the devil has got into you?” We talk about . . . “control”, but self-control is a rare and remarkable virtue. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 8.
If left to himself, [man] can naturally bring about his own salvation. Who has produced Christ? Who has produced Buddha? ~Carl Jung; “C. G.Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff: A Collection of Remembrances” edited by Feme Jensen.
Man . . . never perceives anything fully or comprehends anything completely. He can see, hear, touch, and taste; but how far he sees, how well he hears, what his touch tells him, and what he tastes depend upon the number and quality of his senses. These limit his perception of the world around him. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 4.
The spirit … is two-faced and paradoxical: a great help and an equally great danger. ~Carl Jung; “On the Nature of the Psyche”, 1947.
A decent oligarchy-call it aristocracy if you like-is the most ideal form of government. It depends on the quality of a nation whether they evolve a decent oligarchy or not. … Without the aristocratic ideal there is no stability. You in England owe it to the “gentlemen” that you possess the world. ~Carl Jung; “C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters.”
Wherever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator State, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units. ~Carl Jung; “The Undiscovered Self”, 1957.
Intuition [is] perception via the unconscious. ~Carl Jung; “The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious”, 1950.
Everything that the modern mind cannot define it regards as insane. ~Carl Jung; “Psychology and Alchemy,”1944.
Individuation does not shut one out from the world, but gathers the world to oneself. ~Carl Jung; “On the Nature of the Psyche,”1947.
Christian civilization has proved hollow to a terrifying degree: it is all veneer, but the inner man has remained untouched, and therefore unchanged. His soul is out of key with his external beliefs; in his soul the Christian has not kept pace with external developments. Yes, everything is to be found outside-in image and in word, in Church and Bible-but never inside. Inside reign the archaic gods, supreme as of old. ~Carl Jung; “Psychology and Alchemy,”1944.
I could not say I believe. I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something stronger than myself, something that people call God. ~Carl Jung; “The Old Wise Man” published in Time, 1955. [Note: Dr. Jung’s clarification of this quotation may be read at this link: http://carljungdepthpsychology.blogspot.com/2012/11/dr-jung-said-i-dont-believe-i-know.html%5D
An understanding heart is everything, in a teacher. … One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child. ~Carl Jung; “The Gifted Child,”1942.
Real increase of personality means consciousness of an enlargement that flows from inner sources. ~Carl Jung; “The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious”, 1950.
Out of opposition, a new birth. ~Carl Jung; “Psychology of the Transference,” 1946.
Once the exploration of the unconscious has [begun] … , the individual is confronted with the abysmal contradictions of human nature, and this confrontation in turn leads to the possibility of a direct experience of light and darkness, of Christ and the devil. ~Carl Jung; “Psychology and Alchemy,”1944.
Good does not become better by being exaggerated, but worse, and a small evil becomes a big one through being disregarded and repressed. The Shadow is very much a part of human nature, and it is only at night that no shadows exist. ~Carl Jung; Carl Jung: “A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity (1942) In CW 11; Psychology and Religion: West and East. Page 286.
Water is the commonest symbol for the unconscious. The lake in the valley is the unconscious, which lies, as it were, underneath consciousness, so that it is often referred to as the ‘subconscious,’ usually with the pejorative connotation of an inferior consciousness. Water is the ‘valley spirit,’ the water dragon of Tao, whose nature resembles water- a yang in the yin, therefore, water means spirit that has become unconscious.” (Carl Jung, CW 9i, para 40)
There is no position without its negation. In or just because of their extreme opposition, neither can exist without the other. It is exactly as formulated in classical Chinese philosophy: yang (the light, warm, dry, masculine principle) contains within it the seed of yin (the dark, cold, moist, feminine principle), and vice versa. Matter therefore would contain the seed of spirit and spirit the seed of matter…. Nevertheless, the symbol has the great advantage of being able to unite heterogeneous or even incommensurable factors in a single image. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i; para. 197.
We know that Tom Thumbs, dactyls, and Cabiri… are personifications of creative forces… Thus the creative dwarfs toil away in secret; the phallus also working in darkness, begets a living being” (CW5, para. 180)
We have, therefore, two kinds of thinking: directed thinking, and dreaming or fantasy-thinking. The former operates with speech elements for the purpose of communication, and is difficult and exhausting; the latter is effortless, working as it were spontaneously, with the contents ready to hand, and guided by unconscious motives. The one produces innovations and adaptation, copies reality, and tries to act upon it; the other turns away from reality, sets free subjective tendencies, and, as regards adaptation, is unproductive ~Carl Jung; Two Kinds of Thinking; para. 20.
Life is teleology par excellence; it is the intrinsic striving towards a goal, and the living organism is a system of directed aims which seek to fulfill themselves. ~Carl Jung; CW 8; para 798.
What he is describing here is the libido, which is not only creative and procreative, but possesses an intuitive faculty, a strange power to “smell the right place,” almost as if it were a live creature with an independent life of its own (which is why it is so easily personified). It is purposive, like sexuality itself, a favorite object of comparison. ~Carl Jung; CW 5; Symbols of Transformation; para. 182.
The sun is not only beneficial, but also destructive; hence the zodiacal sign for August heat is the ravaging lion which Samson slew in order to rid the parched earth of its torment. Yet it is in the nature of the sun to scorch, and its scorching power seems natural to man. It shines equally on the just and the unjust, and allows useful creatures to flourish as well as the harmful. ~Carl Jung; CW 5; Symbols of Transformation; para 176.
The psychic life-force, the libido, symbolizes itself… through phallic symbols.~Carl Jung; Symbols of Transformation; para. 297.
More especially the threat to one’s inmost self from dragons and serpents points to the danger of the newly acquired consciousness being swallowed up again by the instinctive psyche, the unconscious. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i; para. 282.
Therefore the sun is perfectly suited to represent the visible God of this world, i.e., the creative power of our own soul, which we call libido, and whose nature it is to bring forth the useful and to bring forth the useful and the harmful, the good and the bad. ~Carl Jung; CW 5; Symbols of Transformation; para 176.
…..instinct is purposive. It works properly only under certain conditions, and as soon as it gets out of tune with these conditions it threatens the destruction of the species. ~Carl Jung; Analytical Psychology: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1925 by C.G. Jung; Page 86.
Because of its unconscious component the self is so far removed from the conscious mind that it can only be partially expressed by human figures; the other part of it has to be expressed by objective, abstract symbols. The human figures are father and son, mother and daughter, king and queen, god and goddess…. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 314-315.
This libido is a force of nature, good and bad at once, or morally neutral. Uniting himself with it, Faust succeeds in accomplishing his real life’s work, at first with evil results and then for the benefit of mankind. ~Carl Jung; CW 5; Para 182.
Numerous mythological and philosophical attempts have been made to formulate and visualize the creative force which man knows only by subjective experience. To give but a few examples, I would remind the reader of the cosmogonic significance of Eros in Hesiod, and also of the Orphic figure of Phanes, the ‘Shining One,’ the first-born, the ‘Father of Eros.’ In Orphic terms, Phanes also denotes Priapos, a god of love, androgynous, and equal to the Theban Dionysus Lysios. The Orphic meaning of Phanes is the same as that of the Indian Kama, the God of love, which is also a cosmogonic principle. ~Carl Jung; Symbols of Transformation; para. 198.
It was a familiar idea with the Brahmans to look upon the fire both as the subject and the object of a sacrifice. The fire embraced the offering, and was thus a kind of priest; it carried it to the gods, and was thus a kind of mediator between gods and men. But the fire represented also something divine, a god to whom honor was due, and thus it became both the subject and the object of the sacrifice. Hence the idea that Agni sacrifices himself, that he offers a sacrifice to himself, and likewise that he offers himself as a sacrifice. ~Carl Jung; CW 5; Citing Max Mueller.
the Creator God [takes] on an astromythological, or rather an astrological, character. He has become the sun, and thus finds a natural expression that transcends his moral division into a Heavenly Father and his counterpart the devil. ~Carl Jung; CW 5; Symbols of Transformation; Para 176.
The conscious fantasy may be woven of mythological or any other material; it should not be taken literally, but must be interpreted according to its meaning. ~Carl Jung; Symbols of Transformation; para 44.
[The dream voice] “utters an authoritative declaration or command, either of astonishing common sense or of profound philosophic import. It is nearly always a final statement, usually coming toward the end of a dream, and it is, as a rule, so clear and convincing that the dreamer finds no argument against it. It has, indeed, so much the character of indisputable truth that it can hardly be understood as anything except a final and trenchant summing up of a long process of unconscious deliberation and weighing of arguments.” ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Religion; Page 45.
[The incorporeal spirits lie] beyond our empirical present. [He continues] There is a spiritual world from which the soul receives knowledge of spiritual things whose origins cannot be discovered in this visible world. ~Carl Jung; CW 8.
The application of the comparative method shows without a doubt that the quaternity is a more or less direct representation of the God who is manifest in his creation. We might, therefore, conclude that the symbol spontaneously produced in the dreams of modern people means something similar-the God within. ~Carl Jung; CW 11; para. 101
…a symbol of the unity of personality, a symbol of the self, where the war of opposites finds peace. In this way the primordial being becomes the distant goal of man’s self-development. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i, para. 292-4.
Notwithstanding its monstrosity, the hermaphrodite has gradually turned into a subduer of conflicts and a bringer of healing, ….its power to unite opposites, mediates between the unconscious substratum and the conscious mind. It throws a bridge between present-day consciousness, always in danger of losing its roots, and the natural, unconscious, instinctive wholeness of primeval times. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i, para. 292-4
Under the influence of scientific materialism, everything that could not be seen with the eyes or touched with the hands was held in doubt; such things were even laughed at because of their supposed affinity with metaphysics. Nothing was considered “scientific” or admitted to be true unless it could be perceived by the senses or traced back to physical causes. ~Carl Jung; CW 8. para. 649.
As most people know, one of the basic principles of analytical psychology is that dream-images are to be understood symbolically; that is to say, one must not take them literally, but must surmise a hidden meaning in them. ~Carl Jung; Symbols of Transformation; para 4.
My psychological experience has shown time and again that certain contents issue from a psyche that is more complete than consciousness. They often contain a superior analysis or insight or knowledge which consciousness has not been able to produce. We have a suitable word for such occurrences-intuition.. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Religion; Page 49.
In keeping with its original wind-nature, spirit is always an active, winged, swift-moving being as well as that which vivifies, stimulates, incites, fires, and inspires. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i; para. 390.
There are incorporeal spirits with which the soul associates. ~Carl Jung; CW 8.
It was universally believed in the Middle Ages as well as in the Greco-Roman world that the soul is a substance. Indeed, mankind as a whole has held this belief from its earliest beginnings, and it was left for the second half of the nineteenth century to develop a “psychology without the soul.” ~Carl Jung; CW 8.
Even though spirit is regarded as essentially alive and enlivening, one cannot really feel nature as unspiritual and dead. We must therefore be dealing here with the (Christian) postulate of a spirit whose life is so vastly superior to the life of nature that in comparison with it the latter is no better than death. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i; Para 390.
The ego is the subject of all successful attempts at adaptation so far as these are achieved by the will. ~Carl Jung; CW 9ii; para 11
To put it in modern language, spirit is the dynamic principle, forming for that very reason the classical antithesis of matter-the antithesis, that is, of its stasis and inertia. Basically it is the contrast between life and death. The subsequent differentiation of this contrast leads to the actually very remarkable opposition of spirit and nature. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i; Para 390.
[The soul] is of divine nature and therefore immortal; that there is a power inherent within it which builds up the body, sustains its life, heals its ills. ~Carl Jung; CW 8.
There is only one condition under which you might legitimately call the voice your own, and that is when you assume your conscious personality to be a part of a whole or to be a smaller circle contained in a bigger one.. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Religion; Page 47.
It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are themselves.
Thinking is an act of the soul whereby it becomes conscious of itself and of other things outside itself. ~Carl Jung; Symbols of Transformation; Footnote 2.
I have had occasion to observe, in the course of my daily professional work [that… ] a dream, often of visionary clarity, occurs about the time of the onset of the illness or shortly before, which imprints itself indelibly on the mind and, when analyzed, reveals to the patient a hidden meaning that anticipates the subsequent events of his life. ~Carl Jung; CW 5; para 78
The struggle between light and darkness has broken out everywhere. The rift runs through the whole globe, and set the fire that is smoldering and glowing Germany ablaze wherever we look. The conflagration that broke out in Germany was the outcome of psychic conditions that are universal. Carl Jung; Civilization in Transition; CW 10, par.485.
Everything psychic has a lower and a higher meaning, as in the profound saying of late classical mysticism: ‘Heaven above, Heaven below, stars above, stars below, all that is above also is below, know this and rejoice.’ Here we lay our finger on the secret symbolical significance of everything psychic. ~Carl Jung; CW 5; para 77.
It even seems as if young people who have had a hard struggle for existence are spared inner problems, while those who for some reason or other have no difficulty with adaptation run into problems of sex or conflicts arising from a sense of inferiority. “The Stages of Life” (1930). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P. 762
Everyone who becomes conscious of even a fraction of his unconscious gets outside his own time and social stratum into a kind of solitude. ~Carl Jung; Mysterium Coniunctionis; CW 14: Page 258.
The “realm of the mothers” has not a few connections with the womb. ~Carl Jung; CW 5; Para 182.
I would not deny the possibility of parallel dreams, i.e., dreams whose meaning coincides with or supports the conscious attitude, but in my experience, at least, these are rather rare. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Alchemy; CW 12; Page 48.
The procreative urge– which is how love must be regarded from the natural standpoint– remains the essential attribute of the God ~Carl Jung; Symbols of Transformation; para 87.
The naïve man of antiquity saw the sun as the great Father of heaven and earth and the moon as the fruitful Mother. Everything had its demon, was animated like a human being, or like his brothers the animals. Everything was conceived anthropomorphically or theriomorphically, in the likeness of man or beast. Even the sun’s disk was given wings or little feet to illustrate its motion. ~Carl Jung; Symbols of Transformation; Para 24.
When they [the mystics] descend into the depths of their own being they find ‘in their heart’ the image of the sun, they find their own life-force which they call the ‘sun’ for a legitimate and, I would say, a physical reason because our source of energy and life actually is sun. Our physiological life, regarded as an energy process, is entirely solar ~Carl Jung; Symbols of Transformation; para. 176.
Man’s capacity for consciousness alone makes him man. ~Carl Jung; On the Nature of the Psyche; CW 8; Page 412.
Were there not a secret purposiveness bound up with the supposedly devious path of the libido or with the supposed repression it is certain that such a process could not take place so easily, so naturally, and so spontaneously. ~Carl Jung; CW8; para. 91.
Anyone who wishes to interpret a dream must himself be on approximately the same level as the dream, for nowhere can he see anything more than what he is himself. ~”Marriage as a Psychological Relationship” (1925) In CW 17: The Development of the Personality. P. 324
The language of religion defines God as “love,” there is always the great danger of confusing the love which works in man with the workings of God. ~Carl Jung; Symbols of Transformation; para. 98.
Nobody is immune to a nationwide evil unless he is unshakably convinced of the danger of his own character being tainted by the same evil. Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, CW 18, para 1400 .
The God-image thrown up by a spontaneous act of creation is a living figure, a being that exists in its own right and there-fore confronts its ostensible creator autonomously… As proof of this it may be mentioned that the relation between the creator and the created is a dialectical. ~Carl Jung; CW8, para. 95-96.
There are no “purposeless” psychic processes; that is to say, it is a hypothesis of the greatest heuristic value that the psyche is essentially purposive and directed. ~Carl Jung; CW8, para. 90.
The God-image is a complex of ideas of an archetypal nature, it must necessarily be regarded as representing a certain sum of energy (libido) which appears in which creates the attributes of divinity is the father-imago, while in the older religions it was the mother imago… In certain pagan conceptions of divinity the maternal element is strongly emphasized. ~Carl Jung; Symbols of Transformation; para. 89.
Those born after the flesh are opposed to those born after the spirit, who are not born from the fleshly mother but rom a symbol of the mother. ~Carl Jung; CW 5; Para 313.
In my naturally limited experience there are, among people of maturer age, very many for whom the development of individuality is an indispensable requirement. Hence I am privately of the opinion that it is just the mature person who, in our times, has the greatest need of some further education in individual culture after his youthful education in school or university has molded him on exclusively collective lines and thoroughly imbued him with the collective mentality. ~Carl Jung; “On Psychic Energy” (1928). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P. 112
Language, in its origin and essence, is simply a system of signs or symbols that denote real occurrences or their echo in the human soul. Carl Jung; Symbols of Transformation; para. 13.
How am I to be creative? Nature knows only one answer to that: Through a child (the gift of love). ~Carl Jung; Symbols of Transformation; para 76.
The symbols of the self arise in the depths of the body and they express its materiality every bit as much as the structure of the perceiving consciousness. The symbol is thus a living body, corpus et anima. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i; para 291.
The strong and natural love that binds the child to the father turns away, during the years when the child is outgrowing the family circle, to the higher forms of the father, to authority, to the “Fathers” of the Church and to the father-god visibly represented by them. Nevertheless, mythology is not lacking in consolations. Did not the Word become flesh? And did not the divine pneuma enter into the Virgin’s womb? The whirlwind of Anaxagoras was that same divine nous that produced the world out of itself. Why do we cherish the image of the Immaculate Mother even to this day?” ~Carl Jung; CW 8, para. 76.
Anyone sufficiently interested in the dream problem cannot have failed to observe that dreams also have a continuity forwards-if such an expression be permitted-since dreams occasionally exert a remarkable influence on the conscious mental life even of persons who cannot be considered superstitious or particularly abnormal. ~ Carl Jung; General Aspects of Dream Psychology; In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. pg. 444
In contrast to the meditation found in yoga practice, the psychoanalytic aim is to observe the shadowy presentation — whether in the form of images or of feelings — that are spontaneously evolved in the unconscious psyche and appear without his bidding to the man who looks within. In this way we find once more things that we have repressed or forgotten. Painful though it may be, this is in itself a gain — for what is inferior or even worthless belongs to me as my Shadow and gives me substance and mass. How can I be substantial if I fail to cast a Shadow? I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole; and inasmuch as I become conscious of my Shadow I also remember that I am a human being like any other. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Page 35.
One has to remind oneself again and again that in therapy it is more important for the patient to understand than for the analyst’s theoretical expectations to be satisfied. The patient’s resistance to the analyst is not necessarily wrong; it is rather a sign that something does not “click.” Either the patient is not yet at a point where he would be able to understand, or the interpretation does not fit. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols. (1964) Essay retitled “Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams” In CW 18: P.61
It is the individuals’ task to differentiate himself from all the others and stand on his own feet. All collective identities…interfere with the fulfillment of this task. Such collective identities are crutches for the lame, shields for the timid, beds for the lazy, nurseries for the irresponsible… ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections
What we call civilized consciousness has steadily separated itself from the basic instincts. But these instincts have not disappeared. They have merely lost their contact with our consciousness and are thus forced to assert themselves in an indirect fashion. This may be . . . physical symptoms . . . neurosis . . . various incidents . . . moods . . . unexpected forgetfulness . . . or mistakes of speech. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 72
No judgment can be considered to be final in which its reversibility has not been taken into account. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols.
Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul
Lack of conscious understanding does not mean that the dream has no effect at all. Even civilized man can occasionally observe that a dream which he cannot remember can slightly alter his mood for better or worse. Dreams can be “understood” to a certain extent in a subliminal way, and that is mostly how they work. ~Carl Jung; “Approaching the Unconscious” In Man and His Symbols; Revised and included in CW 18 as “Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams” Page 52.
Whereas I formerly believed it to be my bounden duty to call other persons to order, I now admit that I need calling to order myself. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul.
The two fundamental points in dealing with dreams are these: First, the dream should be treated as a fact, about which one must make no previous assumption except that it somehow makes sense; and second, the dream is a specific expression of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols
He must concern himself with psychic realities, even if he cannot embody them in scientific definitions. That is why no textbook can teach psychology; one learns only by actual experience. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 83.
As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single individual who will experience it and carry it through. The change must indeed begin with an individual; it might be any one of us. Nobody can afford to look round and to wait for somebody else to do what he is loath to do himself. Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols.
We are susceptible only to those suggestions with which we are already secretly in accord. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul.
The archetypal image of the wise man, the savior or redeemer, lies buried and dormant in man’s unconscious since the dawn of culture; it is awakened whenever the times are out of joint and a human society is committed to a serious error. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul.
It is in applied psychology, if anywhere, that today we should be modest and grant validity to a number of apparently contradictory opinions; for we are still far from having anything like a thorough knowledge of the human psyche, that most challenging field of scientific enquiry. For the present we have merely more or less plausible opinions that defy reconciliation. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Page 57.
I . . . regard the symbol as the announcement of something unknown, hard to recognize, and not to be fully determined. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Page 22.
Our age has shifted all emphasis to the here and now, and thus brought about a daemonization of man and his world. The phenomenon of dictators and all the misery they have wrought springs from the fact that man has been robbed of transcendence by the shortsightedness of the super-intellectuals. Like them, he has fallen a victim to unconsciousness. But man’s task is the exact opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 326.
Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche. Just as the human body connects us with the mammals and displays numerous relics of earlier evolutionary stages going back to even the reptilian age, so the human psyche is likewise a product of evolution which, when followed up to its origins, show countless archaic traits. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Page 126.
I knew that in finding the mandala as an expression of the Self I had attained what was for me the ultimate. Perhaps someone else knows more, but not I. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections, ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 197.
It is … only in the state of complete abandonment and loneliness that we experience the helpful powers of our own natures. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul
Wherever there is a reaching down into innermost experience, into the nucleus of personality, most people are overcome by fright, and many run away. Such was the case with this theologian. I am of course aware that theologians are in a more difficult situation than others. On the one hand they are closer to religion, but on the other hand they are more bound by church and dogma. The risk of inner experience, the adventure of the spirit, is in any case alien to most human beings. The possibility that such experience might have psychic reality is anathema to them. All very well if it has a supernatural or at least a “historical” foundation. But psychic? Face to face with this question, the patient will often show an unsuspected but profound contempt for the psyche. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Pages 141-142.
But what will he do when he sees only too clearly why his patient is ill; when he sees that it arises from his having no love, but only sexuality; no faith, because he is afraid to grope in the dark; no hope, because he is disillusioned by the world and by life; and no understanding, because he has failed to read the meaning of his own existence? ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul.
Faith cannot be made: it is in the truest sense a gift of grace. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul
The primordial experience is the source of [creativity]. … In itself it offers no words or images, for it is a vision seen “as in a glass, darkly.” It is merely a deep presentiment that strives to find expression. It is like a whirlwind that seizes everything within reach and, by carrying it aloft, assume a visible shape. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul
A special ability means a heavy expenditure of energy in a particular direction, with a consequent drain from some other side of life. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul.
Neurosis is an inner cleavage-the state of being at war with one- self. … What drives people to war with themselves is the intuition or the knowledge that they consist of two persons in opposition to one another. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul
Archetypal statements are based upon instinctive preconditions and have nothing to do with reason; they are neither rationally grounded nor can they be banished by rational arguments. They have always been part of the world scene representations collectives, as Levy-Bruhl rightly called them. Certainly the ego and its will have a great part to play in life; but what the ego wills is subject in the highest degree to the interference, in ways of which the ego is usually unaware, of the autonomy and numinosity of archetypal processes. Practical consideration of these processes is the essence of religion, insofar as religion can be approached from a psychological point of view. ~Carl Jung Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 353
. . . no man can converse with an animus for five minutes without becoming the victim of his own anima. Anyone who still had enough sense of humour to listen objectively to the ensuing dialogue would be staggered by the vast number of commonplaces, misapplied truisms, clichés from newspapers and novels, shop-soiled platitudes of every description interspersed with vulgar abuse and brain-splitting lack of logic. It is a dialogue which, irrespective of its participants, is repeated millions and millions of times in all languages of the world and always remains essentially the same. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 392 and Aion, CW 9, ii, Page 15
The God-image thrown up by a spontaneous act of creation is a living figure, a being that exists in its own right and there-fore confronts its ostensible creator autonomously… As proof of this it may be mentioned that the relation between the creator and the created is a dialectical. ~Carl Jung; CW 8, para. 95-96.
We carry our past with us, to wit, the primitive and inferior man with his desires and emotions, and it is only with an enormous effort that we can detach ourselves from this burden. If it comes to a neurosis, we invariably have to deal with a considerably intensified shadow. And if such a person wants to be cured it is necessary to find a way in which his conscious personality and his shadow can live together. ~Carl Jung; Answer to Job; CW 11; Psychology and Religion: West and East; Page 1.
The dream is specifically the utterance of the unconscious. . . . It is imperative that we do not pare down the meaning of a dream to fit some narrow doctrine ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Page 11.
It is the way of dreams to give us more than we ask ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Page.
In alchemy the egg stands for the chaos apprehended by the artifex, the prima materia containing the captive world-soul. Out of the egg — symbolized by the round cooking vessel — will rise the eagle or phoenix, the liberated soul, which is ultimately identical with the Anthropos who was imprisoned in the embrace of Physis. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Alchemy; Page 202.
Dreams are the direct expression of unconscious psychic activity ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Page 2.
The psychic fact “God” is a typical autonomism, a collective archetype…It is therefore characteristic not only of all higher forms of religion, but appears spontaneously in the dreams of individuals. ~Carl Jung; CW 8; fn 29.
Bringing to light the parts of the personality that were previously unconscious and subjecting them to conscious discrimination…is…a call to arms that must be answered by the whole personality. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Page 10.
The stirring up of conflict is a Lucipherian virtue in the true sense of the word. Conflict engenders fire, the fire of affects and emotions, and like every other fire it has two aspects, that of combustion and that of creating light. On the one hand, emotion is the alchemical fire whose warmth brings everything into existence and whose heat burns all superfluities to ashes (omnes superfluitates comburit). But on the other hand, emotion is the moment when steel meets flint and a spark is struck forth, for emotion is the chief source of consciousness. There is no change from darkness to light or from inertia to movement without emotion. – “Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype” (1939). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P. 179
I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life – that is to say, over 35 – there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul
No psychic value can disappear without being replaced by another of equivalent intensity. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Page 209
The reality of evil and its incompatibility with good cleave the opposites asunder and lead inexorably to the crucifixion and suspension of everything that lives. Since ‘the soul is by nature Christian’ this result is bound to come as infallibly as it did in the life of Jesus: we all have to be ‘crucified with Christ,’ i.e., suspended in a moral suffering equivalent to veritable crucifixion. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Alchemy; Paragraph 470.
At such moments [“when an archetypal situation occurs”] we are no longer individuals, but the race. . . . ~Carl Jung; On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry; CW 15: 128.
Just as the body bears the traces of its phylogenetic development, so also does the human mind. ~Carl Jung; General Aspects of Dream Psychology; CW 8: 475.
To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light. Once one has experienced a few times what it is like to stand judgingly between the opposites, one begins to understand what is meant by the self. Anyone who perceives his shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle. ~Carl Jung; Good and Evil in Analytical Psychology; CW 10; Civilization in Transition; Page 872.
A man who is unconscious of himself acts in a blind, instinctive way and is in addition fooled by all the illusions that arise when he sees everything that he is not conscious of in himself coming to meet him from outside as projections upon his neighbour. ~Carl Jung; The Philosophical Tree; CW 13; Alchemical Studies; Page 335.
No, the demons are not banished; that is a difficult task that still lies ahead. Now that the angel of history has abandoned the Germans, the demons will seek a new victim. And that won’t be difficult. Every man who loses his shadow, every nation that falls into self-righteousness, is their prey…. We should not forget that exactly the same fatal tendency to collectivization is present in the victorious nations as in the Germans, that they can just as suddenly become a victim of the demonic powers. ~Carl Jung; The Postwar Psychic Problems of the Germans.
Upon every gift that cometh from the god-sun the devil layeth his curse. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Appendix V; Septem Sermones ad Mortuos.
Archetypes speak the language of high rhetoric, even of bombast. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Chapter 6.
The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “man” in a higher sense – he is “collective man,” a vehicle and molder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Literature
At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Chapter 8.
Have the horrors of the World War done nothing to open our eyes, so that we still cannot see that the conscious mind is even more devilish and perverse than the naturalness of the unconscious? ~Carl Jung; CW 16: 327.
Knowledge does not enrich us; it removes us more and more from the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Chapter 9.
. . . every psychic advance of man arises from the suffering of the soul. ~Carl Jung; Psychotherapists or the Clergy; CW 11: 497
. . . we have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Chapter 8.
. . . the anima is bipolar and can therefore appear positive one moment and negative the next; now young, now old; now mother, now maiden; now a good fairy, now a witch; now a saint, now a whore. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i:356.
The deeper ‘layers’ of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat further and further into darkness. . . . they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body’s materiality. . . . Hence ‘at bottom’ the psyche is simply ‘world. ~Carl Jung; The Special Phenomenology of the Child Archetype.
. . . the spirit is the life of the body seen from within, and the body the outward manifestation of the life of the spirit – the two being really one. ~Carl Jung; The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man; CW 10: 195.
The world of gods and spirits is truly ‘nothing but’ the collective unconscious inside me. ~Carl Jung; On ‘The Tibetan Book of the Dead; CW 11; Page 857.
The important thing is what he [a man] talks about, not whether he agrees with it or not. ~Carl Jung; CW 5: 99
The primordial image, or archetype, is a figure–be it a daemon, a human being, or a process–that constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. . . . In each of these images there is a little piece of human psychology and human fate, a remnant of the joys and sorrows that have been repeated countless times in our ancestral history. . . . ~Carl Jung; On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry; CW 15; 127.
. . . Christianity slumbers and has neglected to develop its myth further in the course of the centuries. . . . Our myth has become mute, and gives no answers. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Chapter 12.
The sea is the favorite symbol for the unconscious, the mother of all that lives. ~Carl Jung; Special Phenomenology; Part IV; Psyche & Symbol.
. . . poets . . . create from the very depths of the collective unconscious, voicing aloud what others only dream. ~Carl Jung; CW 6: 323.
Before the bar of nature and fate, unconsciousness is never accepted as an excuse; on the contrary there are very severe penalties for it. ~Carl Jung; Answer to Job; CW 11; Psychology and Religion: West and East; Page 608.
In some way or other we are part of a single, all-embracing psyche, a single “greatest man.” ~Carl Jung; The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man; CW 10: 175.
Rationalism and superstition are complementary. It is a psychological rule that the brighter the light, the blacker the shadow; in other words, the more rationalistic we are in our conscious minds, the more alive becomes the spectral world of the unconscious. ~Spuk: Irrglaube oder Wahrglaube? ; Foreword by C. G. Jung; In CW 18: P. 10.
The unconscious is not a demoniacal monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgment go, is completely neutral. It only becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree that we repress it, its danger increases. ~Carl Jung; The Practical Use of Dream Analysis; CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy; Page 329.
Anyone who penetrates into the unconscious with purely biological assumptions will become stuck in the instinctual sphere and be unable to advance beyond it, for he will be pulled back again and again into physical existence. ~Carl Jung; The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Psychological commentary; CW 11; Psychology and Religion: West and East; Page 843.
We know that the mask of the unconscious is not rigid -it reflects the face we turn towards it. Hostility lends it a threatening aspect, friendliness softens its features. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Alchemy; CW 12; Page 29.
Only what is really oneself has the power to heal. ~Carl Jung; CW 7: 258
The unconscious is the only available source of religious experience. This in certainly not to say that what we call the unconscious is identical with God or is set up in his place. It is simply the medium from which religious experience seems to flow. As to what the further cause of such experience might be, the answer to this lies beyond the range of human knowledge. Knowledge of God is a transcendental problem. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self.
Empirical psychology loved, until recently, to explain the “unconscious” as mere absence of consciousness-the term itself indicates as much-just as shadow is an absence of light. Today accurate observation of unconscious processes has recognized, with all other ages before us, that the unconscious possesses a creative autonomy such as a mere shadow could never be endowed with. Carl Jung; CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East; Page 14.
The unconscious mind of man sees correctly even when conscious reason is blind and impotent. ~Carl Jung; Answer to Job; CW 11; Psychology and Religion: West and East; Page 608.
Nobody can say where man ends. That is the beauty of it. The unconscious of man can reach God knows where. There we are going to make discoveries. ~Four Filmed Interviews with Richard I. Evans” (1957). Conversations with Carl Jung.
Any attempt to determine the nature of the unconscious state runs up against the same difficulties as atomic physics: the very act of observation alters the object observed. Consequently, there is at present no way of objectively determining the real nature of the unconscious. ~ Carl Jung; Mysterium Coniunctionis; CW 14; Page 88.
The unconscious is the unwritten history of mankind from time unrecorded. ~Carl Jung; A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity; In CW 11; Psychology and Religion: West and East; Page 280.
The man who has attained consciousness of the present is solitary. The “modern” man has at all times been so, for every step towards fuller consciousness removes him further from his original, purely animal participation mystique with the herd, from submersion in a common unconsciousness. Every step forward means tearing oneself loose from the maternal womb of unconsciousness in which the mass of men dwells. ~Carl Jung; “The Spiritual Problems of Modern Man” (1928). In CW 10: Civilization in Transition. P. 150
The new attitude gained in the course of analysis tends sooner or later to become inadequate in one way or another, and necessarily so, because the flow of life again and again demands fresh adaptation. Adaptation is never achieved once and for all.…In the last resort it is highly improbable that there could ever be a therapy which got rid of all difficulties. Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health. What concerns us here is only an excessive amount of them. ~Carl Jung; CW 9; The Transcendent Function.
Just as a man as a social being, cannot in the long run exist without a tie to the community, so the individual will never find the real justification for his existence, and his own spiritual and moral autonomy, anywhere except in an extramundane principle capable of relativizing the overpowering influence of external factors. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 23.
If one honors God, the sun or the fire, then one honors one’s own vital force, the libido. It is a Seneca says: “god is near you, he is with you, in you.” God is our own longing to which we pay divine honors. ~Carl Jung; The Psychology of the Unconscious.
Even if we did not know by reason our need for salt in our food, we should nonetheless profit from its use. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 76
Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self, Chapter 4
It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of a few little weaknesses and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible that he should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster’s body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost. Having a dark suspicion of these grim possibilities, man turns a blind eye to the shadow-side of human nature. Blindly he strives against the salutary dogma of original sin, which is yet so prodigiously true. Yes, he even hesitates to admit the conflict of which he is so painfully aware. ~Carl Jung; On the Psychology of the Unconscious; CW 7; Two Essays on Analytical Psychology; Page 35.
It is really the mistake of our age. We think it is enough to discover new things, but we don’t realize that knowing more demands a corresponding development of morality. ~Carl Jung; Letter to Father Victor White
It is no easy matter to live a life that is modeled on Christ’s, but it is unspeakably harder to live one’s own life as truly as Christ lived his. Anyone who did this would run counter to the conditions of his own history, and though he might thus be fulfilling them, he would nonetheless be misjudged, derided, tortured and crucified. ~Carl Jung; CW 11; Psychology and Religion; Page 340; Para 522.
When I was working on the stone tablets, I became aware of the fateful links between me and my ancestors. I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished. It is difficult to determine whether these questions are more of a personal or more of a general (collective) nature. It seems to me that the latter is the case. A collective problem, if not recognized as such, always appears as a personal problem, and in individual cases may give the impression that something is out of order in the realm of the personal psyche. The personal sphere is indeed disturbed, but such disturbances need not be primary; they may well be secondary, the consequence of an insupportable change in the social atmosphere. The cause of disturbance is, therefore, not to be sought in the personal surroundings, but rather in the collective situation. Psychotherapy has hitherto taken this matter far too little into account. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams, Reflections; Pages 233-234.
Dreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche, outside the control of the will. They are pure nature; they show us the unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature when our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impasse. ~Carl Jung; The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man; CW 10; Civilization in Transition; Page 317.
The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand diem, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams Reflections; Page 193.
Once we have freed ourselves from the prejudice that we have to refer to concepts of external experience or to a priori categories of reason, we can turn our attention and curiosity wholly to that strange and unknown thing we call spirit. ~Carl Jung; Spirit and Life ; CW 8; Paragraph 626
From the psychological point of view, the phenomenon of spirit, like every autonomous complex, appears as an intention of the unconscious superior to, or at least on a par with, intentions of the ego. If we are to do justice to the essence of the thing we call spirit, we should really speak of a “higher” consciousness rather than of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung; Spirit and Life; CW 8, par. 643.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge. Carl Jung; Aion; CW 9; Part II; Page 14.
The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semihuman, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, “divine.” ~Carl Jung; The Practice of Psychotherapy; Page 364.
One must give up the retrospective longing which only wants to resuscitate the torpid bliss and effortlessness of childhood. ~Carl Jung; The Sacrifice; CW 5; Paragraph 643.
Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche. This is the World Power that vastly exceeds all other powers on earth. The Age of Enlightenment, which stripped nature and human institutions of gods, overlooked the God of Terror who dwells in the human soul. ~Carl Jung; The Development of Personality.
Because the anima wants life, she wants both good and bad. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i; Paragraph 59.
Whoever carries over into the afternoon the law of the morning, or the natural aim, must pay for it with damage to his soul, just as surely as a growing youth who tries to carry over his childish egoism into adult life must pay for this mistake with social failure. ~Carl Jung; In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche; The Stages of Life; Page 787.
Anyone who has lost the historical symbols and cannot be satisfied with substitutes is certainly in a very difficult position today: before him there yawns the void, and he turns away from it in horror. What is worse, the vacuum gets filled with absurd political and social ideas, which one and all are distinguished by their spiritual bleakness. But if he cannot get along with these pedantic dogmatisms, he sees himself forced to be serious for once with his alleged trust in God, though it usually turns out that his fear of things going wrong if he did so is even more persuasive. ~Carl Jung; Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious; CW 9; Part I: Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious; Page 28.
There is nothing without spirit, for spirit seems to be the inside of things … inside is spirit, which is the soul of objects. Whether this is our psyche or the psyche of the universe we don’t know, but if one touches the earth one cannot avoid the spirit. ~Carl Jung; The Vision Seminars; Pages 164-165.
What is it, in the end, that induces a man to go his own way and to rise out of unconscious identity with the mass. . . ? Is it what is commonly called vocation . . . [which] acts like a law of God from which there is no escape. . . . Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is called. ~Carl Jung; The Development of the Personality
Instincts…are highly conservative and of extreme antiquity as regards both their dynamism and their form. Their forms, when represented to the mind, appears as an image which expresses the nature of the instinctive impulse visually and concretely, like a picture … ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self.
The divine process of change manifests itself to our human understanding . . . as punishment, torment, death, and transfiguration. ~Carl Jung; Alchemical Studies.
The world comes into being when man discovers it. But he only discovers it when he sacrifices his containment in the primal mother, the original state of unconsciousness. ~Carl Jung; Symbols of Transformation; CW 5: P.652.
The distinction between mind and body is an artificial dichotomy, a discrimination which is unquestionably based far more on the peculiarity of intellectual understanding than on the nature of things. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul
When a summit of life is reached, when the bud unfolds and from the lesser the greater emerges, then, as Nietzsche says, ‘One becomes Two,’ and the greater figure, which one always was but which remained invisible, appears to the lesser personality with the force of a revelation . . . –a moment of deadliest peril! ~Carl Jung; The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
Consciousness is a very recent acquisition of nature, and it is still in an “experimental” state. It is frail . . . and easily injured. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 6.
The psyche is nothing different from the living being. It is the psychical aspect of the living being. It is even the psychical aspect of matter. It is a quality. ~Carl Jung; Conversations with Carl Jung and Richard L. Evans
It is commonly assumed that on some given occasion in prehistoric times, the basic mythological ideas were “invented” by a clever old philosopher or prophet, and ever afterward “believed” by a credulous and uncritical people. But the very word “invent” is derived from the Latin invenire, and means “to find” and hence to find something by “seeking” it. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 69.
The problem of crucifixion is the beginning of individuation; there is the secret meaning of the Christian symbolism, a path of blood and suffering. ~Carl Jung; Quoted in Aspects of Jung’s Personality and Work by Gerhard Adler
Many people mistakenly overestimate the role of will power and think that nothing can happen to their minds that they do not decide and intend. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; P. 22
This is what happens very frequently about the midday of life, and in this wise our miraculous human nature enforces the transition that leads from the first half of life to the second. It is a metamorphosis from a state in which man is only a tool of instinctive nature, to another in which he is no longer a tool, but himself: a transformation of nature into culture, of instinct into spirit. ~Carl Jung; CW17, § 335.
When the medical psychologist takes an interest in symbols, he is primarily concerned with “natural” symbols, as distinct from “cultural” symbols. The former are derived from the unconscious . . . the cultural on the other hand . . . used to express “eternal truths”, and . . . still used in many religions. Page 83.
We can find clear proof of this fact in the history of science itself. The so-called “mystical” experience of the French philosopher Descartes involved a . . . sudden revelation in which he saw in a flash the “order of all sciences”. The British author Robert Louis Stevenson had spent years looking for a story that would fit his “strong sense of man’s double being,” when the plot of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was suddenly revealed to him in a dream. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; P. 25.
A remarkable instance of this can be found in the Eleusinian mysteries, which were finally suppressed in the beginning of the seventh century of the Christian era. They expressed, together with the Delphic oracle, the essence and spirit of ancient Greece. On a much greater scale, the Christian era itself owes its name and significance to the antique mystery of the god-man, which has its roots in the archetypal Osiris-Horus myth of ancient Egypt. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; P. 68.
[The Holy Ghost descending at Pentecost brings about for the individual] not an ‘imitation of Christ’ but its exact opposite: an assimilation of the Christ-image to his own self. . . . It is no longer an effort, an intentional straining after imitation, but rather an involuntary experience of the reality represented by the sacred legend. ~Carl Jung; Mysterium Coniunctionis
We find . . . in everyday life, where dilemmas are sometimes solved by the most surprising new propositions; many artists, philosophers, and even scientists owe some of their best ideas to inspirations . . . from the unconscious. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; P. 25
Anthropologists have often described what happens to a primitive society when its spiritual values are exposed to the impact of modern civilization. Its people lose the meaning of their lives, their social organization disintegrates, and they themselves morally decay. We are now in the same condition. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; P. 84
. . . we constantly use symbolic terms to represent concepts that we cannot define or fully comprehend. This is one of the reasons why all religions employ symbolic language or images. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; P. 4
The ritual act [of the Mass] consecrates both the gift and the givers. It commemorates and represents the Last Supper which our Lord took with His disciples, the whole Incarnation, Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ. But from the point of view of the divine, this anthropomorphic action is only the outer shell of husk in which what is really happening is not a human action at all but a divine event. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Religion.
Because a child is . . . small and its conscious thoughts scarce and simple, we do not realize the far-reaching complications of the infantile mind that are based on its original identity with the prehistoric psyche. That original mind is just as much present and still functioning in the child as the evolutionary stages of mankind are in its embryonic body. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 89.
The doctor should not strive to heal at all costs. One has to be exceedingly careful not to impose one’s own will and conviction on the patient. … Sometimes it is really a question whether you are allowed to rescue a man from the fate he must undergo for the sake of his further development. ~Carl Jung; Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice; 1935.
The sad truth is that man’s real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites . . . day and night . . . birth and death . . . happiness and misery . . . good and evil. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 75.
. . . one must learn . . . between intentional and unintentional contents of the mind. The former are derived from the ego personality; the latter, however, arise from a source that is not identical with the ego, but is its “other side”. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; P. 22.
Greater than all physical dangers are the tremendous effects of delusional ideas […].The world powers that rule over humanity, for good or ill, are unconscious psychic factors, and it is they that bring unconsciousness into being […].We are steeped in a world that was created by our own psyche. Carl Gustav Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Collected Works 8, par.747
We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions. ~The Symbolic Life (1953); also in Man and His Symbols.
Life is a battleground. It always has been, and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 75
God always speaks mythologically. Carl Jung, Letters; vol.2; Page 9.
We see colors? But not wave lengths. ~Carl Jung; Collected Works; Volume 6
…a symbol of the unity of personality, a symbol of the self, where the war of opposites finds peace. In this way the primordial being becomes the distant goal of man’s self-development. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i; Paragraph 293.
Spirit and matter may well be forms of one and the same transcendental being. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i; ¶ 392.
Unconsciousness is the primal sin, evil itself, for the Logos. ~Carl Jung; Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype, ibid” par. 178.]
This is certainly not to say that what we call the unconscious is identical with God or is set up in his place. It is the medium from which the religious experience seems to flow. As to what the further cause of such an experience may be, the answer to this lies beyond the range of human knowledge. Knowledge of God is a transcendental problem. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self.
A dream that is not understood remains a mere occurrence; understood it becomes a living experience. ~Carl Jung CW11; Page 497.
The hermaphrodite means nothing less than a union of the strongest and most striking opposites… The primordial idea has become a symbol of the creative union of opposites, “uniting symbol” in the literal sense. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i; Paragraph 293.
Faith, hope, love, and insight are the highest achievements of human effort. They are found-given-by experience.” ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul
Even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky ~Carl Jung; Book of Job; Para. 758.
[If the unconscious is] […] properly dealt with in one place only, it is influenced as a whole, i.e., simultaneously and everywhere. Carl Gustav Jung, Letters, vol.2; Page 595
These biological considerations naturally apply also to Homo sapiens, who still remain within the framework of general biology despite the possession of consciousness, will, and reason. The fact that our conscious activity is rooted in instinct and derives from it its dynamism, as well as the basic features of its ideational forms, has the same significance for human psychology as for all other members of the animal kingdom. Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self.
The greatest mistake an analyst can make is to assume that his patient has a psychology similar to his own. ~Carl Jung; General Aspects of Dream Psychology; CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.498
The dream is often occupied with apparently very silly details, thus producing an impression of absurdity, or else it is on the surface so unintelligible as to leave us thoroughly bewildered. Hence we always have to overcome a certain resistance before we can seriously set about disentangling the intricate web through patient work. But when at last we penetrate to its real meaning, we find ourselves deep in the dreamer’s secrets and discover with astonishment that an apparently quite senseless dream is in the highest degree significant, and that in reality it speaks only of important and serious matters. This discovery compels rather more respect for the so-called superstition that dreams have a meaning, to which the rationalistic temper of our age has hitherto given short shrift. ~Carl Jung; On the Psychology of the Unconscious; In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology; Page 24.
Every science is a function of the mind, and all knowledge is rooted in it. The mind is the greatest of all cosmic wonders. ~Carl Jung; On the Nature of the Psyche; CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche; Page 357.
Remember that you can know yourself and with that you know enough. But you cannot know others and everything 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.
If we want to interpret a dream correctly, we need a thorough knowledge of the conscious situation at that moment, because the dream contains its unconscious complement, that is, the material which the conscious situation has constellated in the unconscious. Without this knowledge it is impossible to interpret a dream correctly, except by a lucky fluke. ~Carl Jung; General Aspects of Dream Psychology; Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche; Page 477.
On paper the interpretation of a dream may look arbitrary, muddled, and spurious; but the same thing in reality can be a little drama of unsurpassed realism. To experience a dream and its interpretation is very different from having a tepid rehash set before you on paper. Everything about this psychology is, in the deepest sense, experience; the entire theory, even where it puts on the most abstract airs, is the direct outcome of something experienced. ~Carl Jung; On the Psychology of the Unconscious; CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology; Page 199.
Dreams are as simple or as complicated as the dreamer is himself, only they are always a little bit ahead of the dreamer’s consciousness. I do not understand my own dreams any better than any of you, for they are always somewhat beyond my grasp and I have the same trouble with them as anyone who knows nothing about dream interpretation. Knowledge is no advantage when it is a matter of one’s own dreams. ~Carl Jung; Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice: The Tavistock Lectures. (1935). CW 18: (retitled) The Tavistock Lectures. P. 122
For higher than science or art as an end in itself stands man, the creator of his instruments. ~Carl Jung; “Analytical Psychology and Weltanschauung” (1928). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.737
Because we cannot discover God’s throne in the sky with a radiotelescope or establish (for certain) that a beloved father or mother is still about in a more or less corporeal form, people assume that such ideas are “not true.” I would rather say that they are not “true” enough, for these are conceptions of a kind that have accompanied human life from prehistoric times, and that still break through into consciousness at any provocation. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols
If we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us. ~Carl Jung; The Content of the Psychoses; The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease.
What most overlook or seem unable to understand is the fact that I regard the psyche as real. ~Carl Jung; CW 11; Paragraph 751.
[T]he collective unconscious is simply Nature — and since Nature contains everything it also contains the unknown. … So far as we can see, the collective unconscious is identical with Nature to the extent that Nature herself, including matter, is unknown to us. I have nothing against the assumption that the psyche is a quality of matter or matter the concrete aspect of the psyche, provided that ‘psyche’ is defined as the collective unconscious. ~Carl Jung; Letters, vol. 2, P 450
Nature is not matter only, she is also spirit. ~Carl Jung; CW 13; Paragraph 229.
If I get another perfectly normal adult malingering as a sick patient I’ll have him certified! ~Carl Jung to Emma Jung. [Vincent Brome Biography]
Since psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another and ultimately rest on irrepresentable, transcendental factors, it is not only possible but fairly probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing. ~Carl Jung; CW 8, ¶ 420.
The art of interpreting dreams cannot be learnt from books. Methods and rules are good only when we can get along without them. Only the man who can do it anyway has real skill, only the man of understanding really understands. ~Carl Jung; The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man; CW 10: Civilization in Transition. pg. 327
True joy is simple: it comes and exists from itself and is not to be sought here and there. At the risk of encountering 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
This spirit is an autonomous psychic happening, a hush that follows the storm, a reconciling light in the darkness of man’s mind, secretly bringing order into the chaos of his soul. ~Carl Jung; CW 11; Paragraph 260.
The great problem of our time is that we do not understand what is happening to the world. We are confronted with the darkness of our soul, the unconscious. Carl Jung; Letters, Volume 2; Page 590 .
I have been compelled, in my investigations into the structure of the unconscious, to make a conceptual distinction between soul and psyche. By psyche I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious. By soul, on the other hand, I understand a clearly demarcated functional complex that can best be described as a “personality.” ~Carl Jung; [Definitions,” CW 6, par. 797]
Nothing is so apt to challenge our self-awareness and alertness as being at war with oneself. One can hardly think of any other or more effective means of waking humanity out of the irresponsible and innocent half-sleep of the primitive mentality and bringing it to a state of conscious responsibility. ~Carl Jung; Psychological Typology; CW 6; Psychological Types. P. 964.
The alchemists projected the inner event into an outer figure, so for them the inner friend appeared in the form of the “Stone,” of which the Tractatus aureus : “Understand, ye sons of the wise, what this exceeding precious Stone crieth out to you: Protect me and I will protect thee. Give me what is mine that I may help thee.” To this a scholiast adds: “The seeker after truth hears both the Stone and the Philosopher speaking as if out of one mouth.” The Philosopher is Hermes, and the Stone is identical with Mercurius, the Latin Hermes. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i; Para 283
Similarly, other people are established inalienably in my memories only if their names were entered in the scrolls of my destiny from the beginning, so that encountering them was at the same time a kind of recollection. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 5.
From the earliest times, Hermes was the mystagogue and psycho pomp of the alchemists, their friend and counselor, who leads them to the goal of their work. He is “like a teacher mediating between the stone and the disciple.” To others the friend appears in the shape of Christ or Khidr or a visible or invisible guru, or some other personal guide or leader figure. ~Carl Jung, CW 9I, para. 283
Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 183.
Our unconscious, on the other hand, hides living water, spirit that has become nature, and that is why it is disturbed. Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists, and the divine empyrean a fair memory of things that once were. But ‘the heart glows,’ and a secret unrest gnaws at the roots of our being. Dealing with the Unconscious has become a question of life for us. ~Carl Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, Paragraph 50.
It would be blasphemy to assert that God can manifest Himself everywhere save only in the human soul. Indeed the very intimacy of the relationship between Cod and the soul automatically precludes any devaluation of the latter. It would be going perhaps too far to speak of an affinity; but at all events the soul must contain in itself the faculty of relation to God, i.e. a correspondence, otherwise a connection could never come about This correspondence is, in psychological terms, the archetype of the God-image [q.v.]” ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Pages 399-400 and Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12, par. 11.
For indeed our consciousness does not create itself it wells up from unknown depths. In childhood it awakens gradually, and all through life it wakes each morning out of the depths of sleep from an unconscious condition. It is like a child that is born daily out of the primordial womb of the unconscious.” ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 394 and Psychology and Religion: West and East, CW 11, pp. 569 f.
The self is not only the centre but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of consciousness. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 398 and Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12, par. 44.
The crucial point is that I confront the patient as one human being to another. Analysis is a dialogue demanding two partners. … The doctor has something to say, but so has the patient. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams, and Reflections; Page 131.
I’m sometimes driven to the conclusion that boring people need treatment more urgently than mad people. ~Carl Jung Letter to George Beckwith
Only gradually did I discover what the mandala really is: Formation, Transformation, Eternal Mind’s eternal recreation. And that is the self, the wholeness of the personality, which if all goes well is harmonious, but which cannot tolerate self-deceptions. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 326.
. . . the self is our life’s goal, for it is the completest expression of that fateful combination we call individuality . . . ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 398 and Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7, par. 404.
Psychic events are facts, are realities, and when you observe the stream of images within, you observe an aspect of the world, of the world within. The psyche, if you understand it as a phenomenon occurring in living bodies, is a quality of matter, just as our body consists of matter. We discover that this matter has another aspect, namely, a psychic aspect. It is simply the world seen from within. (Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters; (The Houston Films).
Nothing so promotes the growth of consciousness as [the] inner confrontation of opposites.” ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 345.
Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 4.
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.
Similarly, other people are established inalienably in my memories only if their names were entered in the scrolls of my destiny from the beginning, so that encountering them was at the same time a kind of recollection. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 5.
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 nto 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
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. He robbed me of speech and writing for everything that was not in his service, namely the melting together of sense and nonsense, which produces the supreme meaning. ~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 o 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
At least sixteen hours out of twenty-four we live exclusively in this everyday world, and the remaining eight we spend preferably in an unconscious condition. Where and when does anything take place to remind us even remotely of phenomena like angels, miraculous feedings, beatitudes, the resurrection of the dead, etc.? It was therefore something of a discovery to find that during the unconscious state of sleep intervals occur, called “dreams,” which occasionally contain scenes having a not inconsiderable resemblance to the motifs of mythology.” ~Carl Jung; Aion; Page 66.
“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
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.
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. ~Contributions to Analytical Psychology p. 193
You see 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 relationships and not to isolation. ~Carl Jung; CW 6; Page 448; Paragraph 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; Memories Dreams and Reflections; 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; Liber Primus; 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; Scrutinies; 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; Scrutinies; 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.
Obeying the inner call of his vocation, Jesus voluntarily exposed himself to the assaults of the imperialistic madness that filled everyone, conqueror and conquered alike. In this way he recognized the nature of the objective psyche which had plunged the whole world into misery and had begotten a yearning for salvation that found expression even in the pagan poets. Far from suppressing or allowing himself to be suppressed by this psychic onslaught, he let it act on him consciously, and assimilated it.
How are we to explain religious processes, for instance, whose nature is essentially symbolical? In abstract form, symbols are religious ideas; in the form of action, they are rites or ceremonies. They are the manifestation and expression of excess libido. At the same time they are stepping-stones to new activities, which must be called cultural in order to distinguish them from the instinctual functions that run their regular course according to natural law. ~Carl Jung; On Psychic Energy; CW 8, par. 91.
A psychology that treats the mind as an epiphenomenon would better call itself brain-psychology, and remain satisfied with the meager results that such a psycho-physiology can yield. The mind deserves to be taken as a phenomenon in its own right; there are no grounds at all for regarding it as a mere epiphenomenon, dependent though it may be on the functioning of the brain. One would be as little justified in regarding life as an epiphenomenon of the chemistry of carbon compounds. – “On Psychic Energy” (1928). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. pp.10
Not your thinking, but your essence, is differentiation. Therefore you must not strive for what you conceive as distinctiveness, but for your own essence. At bottom, therefore, there is only one striving, namely the striving for one’s own essence. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Scrutinies; Page 348.
The highest and most decisive experience of all . . . is to be alone with . . . [one’s] own self, or whatever else one chooses to call the objectivity of the psyche. The patient must be alone if he is to find out what it is that supports him when he can no longer support himself. Only this experience can give him an indestructible foundation. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Alchemy; CW 12: P.32.
Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion. ~Carl Jung; Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype.
Man shall differentiate himself both from spirituality and sexuality. He shall call spirituality mother, and set her between Heaven and earth. He shall call sexuality Phallos, and set him between himself and earth. For the mother and the Phallos are superhuman daimons that reveal the world of the Gods. They affect us more than the Gods since they are closely akin to our essence. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Scrutinies; Page 352.
The unconscious . . . is the source of the instinctual forces of the psyche and of the forms or categories that regulate them, namely the archetypes. ~Carl Jung; The Structure of the Psyche; CW 8, par. 342.
I believe that we have the choice: I preferred the living wonders of the God. I daily weigh up my whole life and I continue to fiery brilliance of the God as a higher and fuller life than the ashes of rationality. The ashes are suicide to me. I could perhaps put out the fire but I cannot deny to myself the experience of the God. Nor can I cut myself off from this experience. I also do not want to, since I want to live. My life wants itself whole. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 339.
We must presumably often go to ourselves to re-establish the connection with the self since it is torn apart all too often, not only by our vices but also by our virtues. For vices as well as virtues always want to live outside. But through constant outer life we forget the self and through this we also become secretly selfish in our best endeavors. What we neglect in ourselves blends itself secretly into our actions toward others. Through uniting with the self we reach God. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 338.
It is submission enough, amply enough, if we subjugate ourselves to our self. The work of redemption is always first to be done on ourselves, if one dare utter such a great word. This work cannot be done without love for ourselves. Must it be done at all? Certainly not, if one can endure crgiven condition and does not feelin need of redemption. The tiresome feeling of needing redemption can finally become too much for one. Then one seeks to rid oneself of it and thus enters into the work of redemption. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 338.
Man is a gateway, through which you pass from the outer world of Gods, daimons, and souls into the inner world, out of the greater into the smaller world. Small and inane is man, already he is behind you, and once again you find yourselves in endless space, in the smaller or inner infinity. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 354.
The drama of the archetypal life of Christ describes in symbolic images the events of the conscious life–as well as in the life that transcends consciousness–of a man who has been transformed by his higher destiny. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Religion
If the projected conflict is to be healed, it must return into the psyche of the individual, where it had its unconscious 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
God is not dead. He is as alive as ever. God is creation, for he is something definite, and therefore differentiated from the Pleroma. God is a quality of the Pleroma, and everything I have said about creation also applies to him. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 348.
The individual ego is the stable in which the Christ-child is born. ~Carl Jung; Collected Works Vol. 11
The spirit is the life of the body seen from within and the body the outward manifestation of the life of the spirit – the two being really one. ~Carl Jung; CW 10; ¶ 195.
We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy. ~Carl Jung; Psychological Types; Conclusion; Page 628.
Men who have understanding should not just believe, but should wrestle for knowledge to the best of their ability. Belief is not everything, but neither is knowledge. Belief does not give us the security and the wealth of knowing. Desiring knowledge sometimes takes away too much belief Both must strike a balance.
How different was the former image of matter – Great Mother – that could encompass and express the profound emotional meaning of Mother Earth. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 336.
The true history of the Spirit is not preserved in learned volumes but in the living psychic organism of every individual. ~Carl Jung, CW 11; 56
That higher and “complete” man is begotten by the “unknown” father and born from Wisdom, and it is he who, in the figure of the puer aeternus—”vultu metabolism albums et ater”—represents our totality, which transcends consciousness. It was this boy into whom Faust had to change, abandoning his inflated onesidedness which saw the devil only outside. Christ’s “Except ye become as little children” is a prefiguration of this, for in them the opposites lie close together; but what is meant is the boy who is born from the maturity of the adult man, and not the unconscious child we would like to remain. ~Carl Jung; Answer to Job, R. Hull, trans. (1984), pp. 157-158
The dream gives a true picture of the subjective state, while the conscious mind denies that this state exists, or recognizes it only grudgingly ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Page 5.
If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves. ~Carl Jung; The Integration of the Personality; Page 285.
The beginning of all things is love, but the being of things is life. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 327.
The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not — which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Alchemy; Page 51.
A story told by the conscious mind has a beginning, a development, and an end but the same is not true of the dream. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 12.
Consciousness naturally resists anything unconscious and unknown ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 17.
If you observe a neurotic person, you see him doing many things that he appears to be doing consciously and purposively, yet if you ask him about them, you will discover that he is either unconscious of them or has something quite different in mind. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 19.
When something slips out of our consciousness it does not cease to exist…It is simply out of sight. Thus part of the unconscious consists of multitudes of temporarily obscured thoughts, impressions and images that, in spite of being lost, continue to influence our conscious minds. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols, Page 18.
. . . so many physicians dismiss statements by hysterical patients as utter lies. Such persons certainly produce more untruths than most of us, but “lie” is scarcely the right word to use. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 19.
Freud and Josef Breuer recognized that neurotic symptoms… are in fact symbolically meaningful. They are one way in which the unconscious mind expresses itself. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 9.
This capacity to isolate part of one’s mind, indeed, is a valuable characteristic. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 8.
Forgetting . . . is a normal process, in which certain conscious ideas lose their specific energy because one’s attention has been deflected. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; P. 20
. . . “civilized” man reacts to new ideas by erecting psychological barriers to protect himself from the shock of facing something new. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 17.
Nothing in us ever remains quite contradicted, and consciousness can take up no position which will not call up, somewhere in the dark corners of the psyche, a negation or a compensatory effect, approval or resentment. This process of coming to terms with the “Other” in us is well worth while, because in this way we get to know aspects of our nature which we would not allow anybody else to show us and which we ourselves would never have admitted. ~Carl Jung; Mysterium Coniunctionis; CW 14: Page 706
The spirit of this time has condemned us to haste. You have no more futurity and no more past if you serve the spirit of this time. We need the life of eternity. We bear the future and the past in the depths. The future is old and the past is young. You serve the spirit of this time, and believe that you are able to escape the spirit of the depths. But the depths do not hesitate any longer and will force you into the mysteries of Christ. It belongs to this mystery that man is not redeemed through the hero, but becomes a Christ himself. The antecedent example of the saints symbolically teaches us this. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 253.
The dream content is to be taken in all seriousness as something that has actually happened to us. . . . Every dream is a source of information and a means of self-regulation; . . . dreams are our most effective aids in building up the personality. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Page 18.
Dreams give information about the secrets of the inner life and reveal to the dreamer hidden factors of [the dreamer’s] personality. . . . There must be a thorough-going, conscious assimilation of unconscious contents. By “assimilation” I mean a mutual interpenetration of conscious and unconscious contents. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Page 16.
The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it. ~Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
Theoretically, there do exist relatively fixed symbols . . . . If there were no relatively fixed symbols, it would be impossible to determine the structure of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Page 21.
Just as conscious contents can vanish into the unconscious, other contents can also arise from it. Besides a majority of mere recollections, really new thoughts and creative ideas can appear which have never been conscious before. They grow up from the dark depths like a lotus. ~”Approaching the Unconscious” In Man and His Symbols (1964), In CW 18: P.37
To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality in fact is. – “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious” (1928). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. P. 242
The great problems of life — sexuality, of course, among others — are always related to the primordial images of the collective unconscious. These images are really balancing or compensating factors which correspond with the problems life presents in actuality. This is not to be marveled at, since these images are deposits representing the accumulated experience of thousands of years of struggle for adaptation and existence. ~Psychological Types Ch. 5, p. 271
Myths go back to the primitive storyteller and his dreams, to men moved by the stirring of their fantasies. These people were not very different from those whom later generations called poets or philosophers. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 78
Archetypes are like riverbeds which dry up when the water deserts them, but which it can find again at any time. An archetype is like an old watercourse along which the water of life has flowed for centuries, digging a deep channel for itself. The longer it has flowed in this channel the more likely it is that sooner or later the water will return to its old bed. ~Carl Jung: CW 10; Civilization in Transition; Wotan; Page 395.
The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness. The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Each of us carries his own life-form—an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Page 69.
Just as man as a social being, cannot in the long run exist without a tie to the community, so the individual will never find the real justification for his existence, and his own spiritual and moral autonomy, anywhere except in an extramundane principle capable of relativizing the overpowering influence of external factors. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 23.
The will is a psychological phenomenon that owes its existence to culture and moral education, but is largely lacking in the primitive mentality. ~Carl Jung; Definitions; CW 6, par. 844.
You can take away a man’s gods, but only to give him others in return. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self Page 63
Hierosgamos. Sacred or spiritual marriage, union of archetypal figures in the rebirth mysteries of antiquity and also in alchemy. Typical examples are the representation of Christ and the Church as bridegroom and bride (sponsus et sponsa) and the alchemical conjunction of sun and moon. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 395.
The seat of faith, however, is not consciousness but spontaneous religious experience, which brings the individual’s faith into immediate relation with God. Here we must ask: Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd? ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 85
[The trickster] is a forerunner of the savior . . . . He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness. ~Carl Jung; On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure; CW 9i, par. 472.
The will is a psychological phenomenon that owes its existence to culture and moral education, but is largely lacking in the primitive mentality. ~Carl Jung; Definitions; CW 6, par. 844.
Taking it in its deepest sense, the shadow is the invisible saurian tail that man still drags behind him. Carefully amputated, it becomes the healing serpent of the mysteries. Only monkeys parade with it. ~Carl Jung; The Integration of the Personality.
Repression is a process that begins in early childhood under the moral influence of the environment and continues through life. ~Carl Jung; The Personal and the Collective Unconscious; CW 7, par. 202.
With a little self-criticism one can see through the shadow-so far as its nature is personal.
But when it appears as an archetype, one encounters the same difficulties as with anima and animus.
In other words, it is quite within the bounds of possibility for a man to recognize the relative evil of his nature, but it is a rare and shattering experience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil. ~Carl Jung; CW 17; The Shadow; Page 338; par. 19.
Only a life lived in a certain spirit is worth living. It is a remarkable fact that a life lived entirely from the ego is dull not only for the person himself but for all concerned. ~Carl Jung; Spirit and Life; CW 8; The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche; Page 645.
To speak of the morning and spring, of the evening and the autumn of life is not mere sentimental jargon. We thus give expression to psychological truths, and even more to physiological facts. ~Carl Jung; The Stages of Life; CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche; Page 780.
Nobody should play with analysis as with an easy tool. Those who write superficial and cheap books about the subject are either unconscious of the far-reaching effects of analytical treatment or else ignorant of the real nature of the human soul. ~Carl Jung; Contributions to Analytical Psychology.
Tears, sorrow, and disappointment are bitter, but wisdom is the comforter in all psychic suffering. Indeed, bitterness and wisdom form a pair of alternatives: where there is bitterness wisdom is lacking, and where wisdom is there can be no bitterness. ~Carl Jung; CW 20; Mysterium Coniunctionis; Page 246; Para 330.
For him who looks backwards the whole world, even the starry sky, becomes the mother who bends over him and enfolds him on all sides, and from the renunciation of this image, and of the longing for it arises the picture of the world as we know it today. ~Carl Jung; The Sacrifice; CW 5; Par 643.
The psyche does not merely react; it gives its own specific answer to the influences at work upon it. ~Carl Jung; Some Crucial Points in Psychoanalysis; CW 4; par. 665.
Sensation must be strictly differentiated from feeling, since the latter is an entirely different process, although it may associate itself with sensation as “feeling-tone.” Sensation is related not only to external stimuli but to inner ones, i.e., to changes in the internal organic processes. [Definitions,” CW 6, par. 792.]
One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games and it cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive selves. ~Jung and the Story of Our Time, Laurens van der Post (1977)
History is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood. ~Carl Jung; Woman in Europe.
Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definitive feminine image.
This image is fundamentally unconscious, an hereditary factor of primordial origin engraved in the living organic system of the man, an imprint or ‘archetype’ [q.v.] of all the ancestral experiences of the female, a deposit, as it were, of all the impressions ever made by woman . . .
Since this image is unconscious, it is always unconsciously projected upon the person of the beloved, and is one of the chief reasons for passionate attraction or aversion.” ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 391.
If it has been believed hitherto that the human shadow was the source of all evil, it can now be ascertained on closer investigation that the unconscious man, that is, his shadow, does not consist only of morally reprehensible tendencies, but also displays a number of good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses, etc.
For two personalities to meet is like mixing two chemical substances: if there is any combination at all, both are transformed. ~Carl Jung; (Psychological Reflections: A New Anthology of His Writings 1905-61
While studying astrology I have applied it to concrete cases many times. … The experiment is most suggestive to a versatile mind, unreliable in the hands of the unimaginative, and dangerous in the hands of a fool, as those intuitive methods always are. . . . It is an apt tool only when used intelligently. ~Carl Jung
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.
In every adult there lurks a child–an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education. That is the part of the personality which wants to develop and become whole. -C. G. Jung CW 17: 286
Our blight is ideologies — they are the long-expected Antichrist!
Nothing so promotes the growth of consciousness as [the] inner confrontation of opposites.” ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 345.
The kernel of all jealousy is lack of love. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 137.
Give no guarantee of objective knowledge. What we do not understand in ourselves we do not understand in the other person either. So there is plenty to ensure that his image will be for the most part subjective. As we know, even an intimate friendship is no guarantee of objective knowledge. – Carl Jung; General Aspects of Dreams Psychology” (1916). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.508
Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche.
Just as the human body connects us with the mammals and displays numerous relics of earlier evolutionary stages going back to even the reptilian age, so the human psyche is likewise a product of evolution which, when followed up to its origins, show countless archaic traits. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Page 126
When Lao-tzu says: “All are clear, I alone am clouded,” he is expressing what I now feel in advanced old age.
Lao-tzu is the example of a man with superior insight who has seen and experienced worth and worthlessness, and who at the end of his life desires to return into his own being, into the eternal unknowable meaning.
The archetype of the old man who has seen enough is eternally true. At every level of intelligence this type appears, and its lineaments are always the same, whether it be an old peasant or a great philosopher like Lao-tzu.
This is old age, and a limitation. Yet there is so much that fills me: plants, animals, clouds, day and night, and the eternal in man.
The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things.
In fact it seems to me as if that alienation which so long separated me from the world has become transferred into my own inner world, and has revealed to me an unexpected unfamiliarity with myself. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 359.
From the beginning I had a sense of destiny, as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled.
This gave me an inner security, and, though I could never prove it to myself, it proved itself to me. I did not have this certainty, it had me. Nobody could rob me of the conviction that it was enjoined upon me to do what God wanted and not what I wanted.
That gave me the strength to go my own way. Often I had the feeling that in all decisive matters I was no longer among men, but was alone with God. And when I was “there,” where I was no longer alone, I was outside time;
I belonged to the centuries; and He who then gave answer was He who had always been, who had been before my birth. He who always is was there.
These talks with the “Other” were my profoundest experiences: on the one hand a bloody struggle, on the other supreme ecstasy. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 48.
I regret many follies which sprang from my obstinacy; but without that trait I would not have reached my goal. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 358
If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely. But loneliness is not necessarily inimical to companionship, for no one is more sensitive to companionship than the lonely man, and companionship thrives only when each individual remembers his individuality and does not identify himself with others. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 356.
“All my writings may be considered tasks imposed from within, their source was a fateful compulsion. What I wrote were things that assailed me from within myself. I permitted the spirit that moved me to speak out.” ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 222.
I have also realized that one must accept the thoughts that go on within oneself of their own accord as part of one’s reality. The categories of true and false are, of course, always present; but because they are not binding they take second place. The presence of thoughts is more important than our subjective judgment of them. But neither must these judgments be suppressed, for they also are existent thoughts which are part of our wholeness. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 298.
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 majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith. The ones who came to me were the lost sheep. Even in this day and age the believer has the opportunity, in his church, to live the “symbolic life.” ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 140.
In science I missed the factor of meaning; and in religion, that of empiricism. Science met, to a very large extent, the needs of No. i personality, whereas the humane or historical studies provided beneficial instruction for No. 2. ~ Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams, Reflections; Page 72
It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 72.
“The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual.” ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 10.
The unconscious is useless without the human mind. It always seeks its collective purposes and never your individual destiny. ~Carl Jung; C.G. Jung Letters; Vol. 1; Page 283.
To be “normal” is the ideal aim for the unsuccessful, for all those who are still below the general level of adaptation. But for people of more than average ability, people who never found it difficult to gain successes and to accomplish their share of the world’s work-for them the moral compulsion to be nothing but normal signifies the bed of Procrustes-deadly and insupportable boredom, a hell of sterility and hopelessness. ~Carl Jung; CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy; P. 161.
Instinct is anything but a blind and indefinite impulse, since it proves to be attuned and adapted to a definite external situation. This latter circumstance gives it its specific and irreducible form. Just as instinct is original and hereditary, so too, its form is age-old, that is to say, archetypal. It is even older and more conservative than the body’s form. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 49.
Just as the body bears the traces of its phylogenetic development, so also does the human mind. Hence there is nothing surprising about the possibility that the figurative language of dreams is a survival from an archaic mode of thought. ~Carl Jung; General Aspects of Dream Psychology; and CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche; Page 475.
When one reflects upon what consciousness really is, one is profoundly impressed by the extreme wonder of the fact that an event which takes place outside in the cosmos simultaneously produces an internal image, that it takes place, so to speak, inside as well, which is to say: becomes conscious. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 394 and Basel Seminar, privately printed, 1934, p. 1.
. . . there are millions . . . who have lost faith in any kind of religion. Such people do not understand their religion any longer. While life runs smoothly without religion . . . when suffering comes, it is another matter. That is when people seek a way out and to reflect about the meaning of life and its bewildering and painful experiences. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 75
Aging people should know that their lives are not mounting and unfolding but that an inexorable inner process forces the contraction of life. For a young person it is almost a sin — and certainly a danger — to be too much occupied with him; but for the aging person it is a duty and a necessity to give serious attention to him. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul Page 125,
Nothing has a more divisive and alienating effect upon society than this moral complacency and lack of responsibility, and nothing promotes understanding and rapprochement more than the mutual withdrawal of projections.” ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 72.
Hence one could say —cum grano salis —that history could be constructed just as easily from one’s own unconscious as from the actual texts. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 86.
Dionysus is the abyss of impassioned dissolution, where all human distinctions are merged in the animal divinity of the primordial psyche—a blissful and terrible experience. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 90.
The intellect may be the devil , but the devil is the “strange son of chaos” who can most readily be trusted to deal effectively with his mother. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 90.
But the principle of the unconscious is the autonomy of the psyche itself, reflecting in the play of its images not the world but itself, even though it utilizes the illustrative possibilities offered by the sensible world in order to make its images clear. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 146.
The Great Mother is impregnated by the loneliness of him that seeks her. ~Carl Jung to Hermann Hesse, Letters Volume 1, Pages 573-574.
A good book, like every proper human life, must have an ending. ~Carl Jung to Hermann Hesse, Letters Volume 1, Pages 573-574.
Through the self we are plunged into the torrent of cosmic events. Everything essential happens in the self and the ego functions as a receiver, spectator, and transmitter. ~C.G.J. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Pages 325-326.
Science seeks the truth because it feels it does not possess it. The church possesses the truth and therefore does not seek it. ~~Carl Jung to H. Irminger; Letters Vol. 2, Page 346.
The symbolic form of love (animus-anima) shrinks from nothing, least of all from sexual union. Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Pages 213-214.
Airplanes and such devilish inventions ought to be avoided. C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 198-200.
Body and spirit are to me mere aspects of the reality of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 198-200.
Body is as metaphysical as spirit. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 198-200.
Ask the modern physicist what body is, they are coming fast across to the recognition of the reality of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 198-200.
This living being appears outwardly as the material body, but inwardly as a series of images of the vital activities taking place within it. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 325, Para 619.
And just as the material of the body that is ready for life has need of the psyche in order to be capable of life, so the psyche presupposes the living body in order that its images may live. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 325, Para 618.
Jesus-Mani-Buddha-Lao-tse are for me the four pillars of the temple of the spirit. ~Carl Jung, Letters, Volume 1, Page 65.
God needs man in to become conscious, just as he needs limitation in time and space. Let us therefore be for him limitation in time and space an earthly tabernacle. ~Carl Jung, Letters, Volume 1, Page 65.
Tears, sorrow, and disappointment are bitter, but wisdom is the comforter in all psychic suffering. ~Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Page 246, Para 330.
When Freud coined the phrase that the ego was “the true seat of anxiety,” he was giving voice to a very true and profound intuition. ~Carl Jung, Psychological, CW 11, Page 849.
An autobiography is so difficult to write because we possess no standards, no objective foundation, from which to judge ourselves. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 3.
<div Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation, and the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions and to experience itself as a whole. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 3.
Consciousness is essentially the psyche’s organ of perception, it is the eye and
ear of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Vol. II, Page 98.
The religion of love was the exact psychological counterpart to the Roman devil-worship of power. ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Pages 180-181, Paras 308-309.
We must read the Bible or we shall not understand psychology. Our psychology, whole lives, our language and imagery are built upon the Bible. ~Carl Jung, The Visions Seminar Vol. 1; Page 156
Suffering is the swiftest steed that bears you to perfection. ~Meister Eckhart cited in Edinger’s The New God Image, Page 162.
Individuals who believe they are masters of their fate are as a rule the slaves of destiny. ~Carl Jung, Letter to Valentine Brooke, 16Nov1959.
God is not blessed in his Godhead, he must be born in man forever. ~ Meister Eckhart
I had to understand that I was unable to make the people see what I am after. I am practically alone. There are a few who understand this and that, but almost nobody sees the whole….I have failed in my foremost task: to open people’s eyes to the fact that man has a soul and there is a buried treasure in the field and that our religion and philosophy are in a lamentable state. Quoted by Gerhard Adler in “Aspects of Jung’s Personality,” in Psychological Perspectives 6/1 (Spring 1975), p. 14.
It is as if we are more inclined to ask the unknown ‘What shall I do?,’ while the East prefers the question: ‘To what total order does my conduct belong? ~Marie Louise Von Franz, Number and Time, p. 120.
Individuation and individual existence are indispensable for the transformation of God. Human consciousness is the only seeing eye of the Deity. ~Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 336, 409, Letters II, 314ff.
We have become participants in the divine nature. We are the vessel…of the deity suffering in the body of the “slave”(Phil. 2:5). ~ ~Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 336, 409, Letters II, 314ff.
The ego participates in God’s suffering. ~Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 336, 409, Letters II, 314ff.
Yahweh and Allah are unreflected God-images, whereas in the Clementine Homilies there is a psychological and reflective spirit at work. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Page 54n.
Man’s suffering does not derive from his sins but from the maker of his imperfections, the paradoxical God. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Par. 1681
The only thing that really matters now is whether man can climb up to a higher moral level, to a higher plane of consciousness, in order to be equal to the superhuman powers which the fallen angels have played into his hands. ~Carl Jung, Answer to Job, Para 746.
The inner instability of Yahweh is the prime cause not only of the creation of the world, but also of the pleromatic drama for which mankind serves as a tragic chorus. . . . the two main climaxes are formed first by the Job tragedy and secondly by Ezekiel’s revelation. ~Carl Jung, Answer to Job, Para 686.
It does not seem to fit God’s purpose to exempt man from conflict and hence from evil. ~Carl Jung, Answer to Job, Para 659.
It was the tragedy of my youth to see my father cracking up before my eyes on the problem of his faith and dying and early death. ~Carl Jung to Pastor Walter Bernet, Letters Volume 2, Page 275
We cannot receive the Holy Spirit unless we have accepted our own individual life as Christ accepted his. Thus we become the “sons of god” fated to experience the conflict of the divine opposites, represented by the crucifixion. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, par. 1551.
[There is a] . . . continued and progressive divine incarnation. Thus man is received and integrated into the divine drama. He seems destined to play a decisive part in it; that is why he must receive the Holy Spirit. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, par. 1551.
If ego consciousness follows its own road exclusively, it is trying to become like a god or a superman. But exclusive recognition of its dependence only leads to a childish fatalism and to a world-negating and misanthropic spiritual arrogance. ~Carl Jung, The Mysteries: Papers from the Eranos, Page 324.
If ego consciousness follows its own road exclusively, it is trying to become like a god or a superman. But exclusive recognition of its dependence only leads to a childish fatalism and to a world-negating and misanthropic spiritual arrogance. ~Carl Jung, The Mysteries: Papers from the Eranos, Page 324.
The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 325.
The divine process of change manifests itself to our human understanding . . . as punishment, torment, death, and transfiguration. ~Carl Jung, Alchemical Studies, CW 13, par. 139.
He said “My kingdom is not of this world.” But “kingdom” it was, all the same. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, p. 97.
It is even very important that the anima is projected into the earth, that she descends very low, for otherwise her ascent to the heavenly condition in the form of Sophia has no meaning…She is the one that is rooted in the earth as well as in the heaven, both root and branch of the tree. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 533.
Words are animals alive with a will of their own. ~Carl Jung.
The problem of crucifixion is the beginning of individuation; there is the secret meaning of the Christian symbolism, a of blood and suffering. ~Carl Jung, unpublished letter, quoted in Gerhard Adler, Aspects of Jung’s Personality and Work, p. 12.
Analysis should release an experience that grips us or falls upon us as from above, an experience that has substance and body such as those things which occurred to the ancients. If I were going to symbolize it I would choose the Annunciation. ~Carl Jung, Seminar 1925, p. 111.
The earthly fate of the Church as the body of Christ is modelled on the earthly fate of Christ himself. That is to say the Church, in the course of her history, moves towards a death. ~Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, par. 28, note 194.
Egocentricity is a necessary attribute of consciousness and is also its specific sin.” ~Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, par. 364.