Some Carl Jung Quotations

The “subtle body,” or “breath body” as it is sometimes called, is an archetypal idea that can be traced back to classical antiquity. It occurs in Poseidonius and Plotinus, in Proclus and Synesius, and later in Paracelsus. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 72.

For the Paracelsists, matter acquired the ineffable quality of an “increatum,” and hence was coexistent and co eternal with God. ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 59.

I devoured the manuscript at once, for the text gave me undreamed-of confirmation of my ideas about the mandala and the circumambulation of the centre. That was the first event that broke through my isolation. I became aware of an affinity; I could establish ties with something and someone. ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 50.

One of the books most frequently quoted by Jung is the anonymous Rosarium philosophorum; it was first published in Frankfurt in 1550, and is also contained in the second volume of Artis Auriferae. Jung’s monograph “The Psychology of the Transference” ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 50.

“Consequently alchemy gains the quite new and interesting aspect of a projected psychology of the collective unconscious, and thus ranks with mythology and folklore. Its symbolism is in the closest relation to dream symbolism on the one hand, and to the symbolism of religion on the other.” ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 57.

“Novum lumen”: “To cause things hidden in the shadow to appear, and to take away the shadow from them, this is permitted to the intelligent philosopher by God; through nature….All these things happen, and the eyes of the common men do not see them, but the eyes of the understanding and of the imagination perceive them with true and truest vision.” ~Michael Sendivogius, Jung’s Last Years, Page 58.

“The conventional guises are dropped and the true man comes to light. He is in very truth reborn from this psychological relationship. [Transference]” ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 67.

The organizing factor would then be the archetype of wholeness, which is as much physical as psychic and may thus be thought of as a “subtle body.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 75.

Synchronicity, Meier says, “presupposes a tertium, higher than soma or psyche, and responsible for symptom formation in both-approximating to the theory of the ‘subtle body.’ ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 75.

The phenomenon is in accord with the alchemical conception of imaginatio as a half corporeal, half spiritual being, whereby the soul is enabled to bring about “many things of the utmost profundity outside the body” by imagining them. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 76.

Michael Sendivogius says: “Moreover the soul by which man differs from other animals operates inside his body, but it has greater efficacy outside the body, for outside the body it rules with absolute power.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 76.

For Jung the stone “contained and. at the same time was the bottomless mystery of being, the embodiment of spirit,” and his kinship with it was “the divine nature in both, in the dead and the living matter.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 76.

“The experiences of the alchemists were, in a sense, my experiences, and their world was my world. ” ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 76.

Yet, unlike the alchemists, what fascinated Jung his life long was not Matter, but Psyche. For the scientist in him she was the object of rigorous empirical research; as a physician he succored her with deepest understanding; as a man he was the master and servant of her transformations. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 77.

At the Congress of the International Society at Bad Nauheim in May 1934, Jung stipulated that the German-Jewish doctors who had been ejected or excluded from the German section could individually become members of the International Society with equal rights, thus preserving their professional and social status. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 81.

Jung, to put it briefly, saw the Jews as a “race with a three thousand year-old civilization,” whereas he attributed to the “Aryans” a “youthfulness not yet fully weaned from barbarism.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 81.

Yet he [Jung] himself, long before the advent of Hitler, had warned in 1918 about “the blond beast menacingly prowling about in its underground prison, ready at any moment to burst out with devastating consequences. ” But who took the warning seriously then? ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 91.

“The doctor who, in wartime, gives his help to the wounded of the other side will surely not be held a traitor to his country.” ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 81.

“Are we really to believe that a tribe which has wandered through history for several thousand years as ‘God’s chosen people’ was not put up to such an idea by some quite special psychological peculiarity? ” ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 89.

When Hitler seized power it became quite evident to me that a mass psychosis was boiling up in Germany. But I could not help telling myself that this was after all Germany, a civilized European nation with a sense of morality and discipline. Hence the ultimate outcome of this unmistakable mass movement still seemed to me uncertain, just as the figure of the Fuhrer at first struck me as being merely ambivalent. . . . Like many of my contemporaries, I had my doubts. ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 89-90.

The driving forces of a psychological mass movement are essentially archetypal. Every archetype contains the lowest and the highest, evil and good, and is therefore capable of producing diametrically opposite results. Hence it is impossible to make out at the start whether it will prove to be positive or negative. ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 90.

“One can love God, and must fear him. ” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 733.

“a change in the attitude of the individual can bring about a renewal in the spirit of the nations.” ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 459.

So in the Upanishads, in contrast to the Chinese viewpoint, the emphasis is not on the opposites as such, but on the peculiar creative process between them. One could say therefore that the general point of view of the Upanishads is monistic. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 81

Atman is the central thing between the opposites; they themselves are almost taken for granted. Lao-tse on the other hand, as we have seen, stresses the opposites, although he knows the way between the two, Tao, and accepts it as the essence of life. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 81