Carl Jung on “Strength” – Quotations – Anthology
Dr. Jung went on to speak of the strength of womanhood, how it is stronger than any [imitation of the] male adaptation, and how a woman who is woman from the crown of her head to the tip of her toe can afford to be masculine, just as a man who is sure of his masculinity can afford to be tender and patient like a woman …. ~Esther Harding, Conversations with Jung, Page 8.
Our life is like the course of the sun. In the morning it gains continually in strength until it reaches the zenith heat of high noon. Then comes the enantiodromia the steady forward movement no longer denotes an increase, but a decrease, in strength. Thus our task in handling a young person is different from the task of handling an older person. In the former case, it is enough to clear away all the obstacles that hinder expansion and ascent; in the latter, we must nurture everything that assists the descent, ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 114
Reflection is the cultural instinct par excellence, and its strength is shown in the power of culture to maintain itself in the face of untamed nature. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 115.
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; CW 10, Para 310.
In our strength we are independent and isolated, are masters of our own fate; in our weakness we are dependent and bound, and become unwilling instruments of fate, for here it is not the individual will that counts but the will of the species. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 261
When yang has reached its greatest strength, the dark power of yin is born within its depths, for night begins at midday when yang breaks up and begins to change into yin. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 13.
There is nothing the emptiness can sacrifice, since it always suffers lack Only fullness can sacrifice, since it has fullness. Emptiness cannot sacrifice its hunger for fullness, since it cannot deny its own essence. Therefore we also need evil. But I can sacrifice my will to evil, because I previously received fullness. All strength flows back to me again, since the evil one has destroyed the image I had of the formation of the God. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 289.
A person carries the torch only a stretch of the way and must then lay it down, not because he has reached a goal but because his strength is at an end. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 194.
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.
But there was a demonic strength in me, and from the beginning there was no doubt in my mind that I must find the meaning of what I was experiencing in these fantasies. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 177
My mind is torn to its very depths. I, who had to be a tower of strength for many weak people, am the weakest of all. Will you forgive me for being as I am? For offending you by being like this, and forgetting my duties as a doctor towards you? Will you understand that I am one of the weakest and most unstable of human beings? And will you never take revenge on me for that, either in words, or in thoughts or feelings? ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, December 4, 1908
Usually he enjoyed a wonderful, deep sleep, and plenty of it, the result not only of his good constitution but of his close and positive relationship with the unconscious. Sleep was the source of his psychic strength. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 105.
Back in the 1930s, Carl Jung, the eminent thinker and psychologist, put it this way: Criticism has ‘the power to do good when there is something that must be destroyed, dissolved or reduced, but [it is] capable only of harm when there is something to be built. ― Donald O. Clifton, Now, Discover Your Strengths