Carl Jung
There is no such thing as a pure extrovert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum.Collection: Men
It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going.Collection: Life
You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible to influence.Collection: Innovation
Life is a luminous pause between two mysteries that are yet one.Collection: Two
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.Collection: Circles
The problem of synchronicity has puzzled me for a long time, ever since the middle twenties, when I was investigating the phenomena of the collective unconscious and kept on coming across connections which I simply could not explain as chance groupings or "runs." What I found were "coincidences" which were connected so meaningfully that their "chance" concurrence would represent a degree of improbability that would have to be expressed by an astronomical figure.Collection: Running
Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The "newness" in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components.Collection: Artist
We cannot imagine events that are connected non-causally and are capable of a non-causal explanation. But that does not mean that such events do not exist.Collection: Mean
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 considered by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being.Collection: World
Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them.Collection: Pieces
Man is in need if a symbolical life- badly in need. We only live banal, ordinary, rational or irrational things- but we have no symbolic life. Where do we live symbolically? Nowhere except where we participate in the ritual of lifeCollection: Men
What we lack is intensity of life.Collection: Intensity
The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Home
Here and there it happened in my practice that a patient grew beyond himself because of unknown potentialities, and this became an experience of prime importance to me. I had learned in the meanwhile that the greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They must be so because they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.Collection: Practice
Music is the application of sounds to the canvas of silence.Collection: Music
I know that in many things I am not like others, but I do not know what I really am like. Man cannot compare himself with any other creature; he is not a monkey, not a cow, not a tree. I am a man. But what is it to be that? Like every other being, I am a splinter of the infinite deity, but I cannot contrast myself with any animal, any plant or any stone. Only a mythical being has a range greater than man's. How then can man form any definite opinions about himself?.Collection: Animal
The longing for light is the longing for consciousness.Collection: Light
In the second half of life the necessity is imposed of recognizing no longer the validity of our former ideals but of their contraries. Of perceiving the error in what was previously our conviction, of sensing the untruth in what was our truth, and of weighing the degree of opposition, and even of hostility, in what we took to be love.Collection: Errors
I can only gaze with wonder and awe at the depths of and heights of our psychic nature. Its non-spatial universe conceals an untold abundance of images which have accumulated over millions of years of living development and become fixed in the organism....Beside this picture I would like to place the spectacle of the starry heavens at night, for the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without; and just as I reach this world through the medium of the body, so I reach that world through the medium of the psyche.Collection: Night
While personal problems are not overlooked, the analyst keeps an eye on their symbolic aspects, for healing comes only from what leads the patient beyond himself and beyond his entanglement in the ego.Collection: Healing
The world of gods and spirits is truly 'nothing but' the collective unconscious inside me.Collection: Collective Unconscious
We are a psychic process which we do not control, or only partly direct. Consequently, we cannot have any final judgment about ourselves or our lives.Collection: Psychics
Whenever there is a reaching down into innermost experience, into the nucleus of personality, most people are overcome by fear and many run away. . . 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.Collection: Running
It is sad but unfortunately true that man learns nothing from history.Collection: Sad
In the history of the collective as in the history of the individual, everything depends on the development of consciousness.Collection: Development
Every father is given the opportunity to corrupt his daughter's nature, and the educator, husband, or psychiatrist then has to face the music. For what has been spoiled by the father can only be made good by a father, just as what has been spoiled by the mother can only be repaired by a mother. The disastrous repetition of the family pattern could be described as the psychological original sin, or as the curse of the Atrides running through the generations.Collection: Mother
The underlying, primary psychic reality is so inconceivably complex that it can be grasped only at the farthest reach of intuition, and then but very dimly. That is why it needs symbols.Collection: Reality
The afternoon of a human life must have a significance of its own, and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life's morning.Collection: Morning
There are two reasons why man loses contact with the regulating center of his soul. One of them is that some single instinctive drive or emotional image can carry him into a one-sidedness that makes him lose his balance...his one-sidedness and consequent loss of balance are much dreaded by primitives, who call it 'loss of soul.' Another threat...circles around particular complexesCollection: Loss
Our unconscious is the key to our life's pursuits.Collection: Keys
Perhaps this sounds very simple, but simple things are always the most difficult. In actual life it requires the greatest discipline to be simple, and the acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook upon life.Collection: Happiness
Just imagine what would happen if practicing physicians, the ones who have come into contact directly with suffering humanity, had some acquaintance with Eastern systems of healing. The Spirit of the East surges through every pore as a balm for all afflictions.Collection: Healing
The meaning and design of a problem seem not to lie in its solution, but in our working at it incessantly.Collection: Lying
Only in our creative acts do we step forth into the light and see ourselves whole and complete.Collection: Light
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.Collection: Self
What usually has the strongest psychic effect on the child is the life which the parents have not livedCollection: Children
With a truly tragic delusion,” Carl Jung noted, “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. 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.Collection: Art
The years... when I pursued the inner images were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything was then.Collection: Years
If only simplicity were not the most difficult of all things. It consists of watching objectively the development of any fragment of fantasy.Collection: Simplicity
Science has destroyed even the refuge of the inner life. What was once a sheltering haven has become a place of terrorCollection: Psychology
People learn from who we are, rather than what we say, and to believe otherwise is a disease of the mind.Collection: Believe
It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world colour and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I call "experience" is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind.Collection: Color
I had always been impressed by the fact that there are surprisingly many individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and yet are not stupid, and an equal number who obviously do use their minds but in an amazingly stupid way.Collection: Stupid
...it seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making. I wnt about with all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they were patients and I was analyzing them. I read a Greek or Negro myth as if a lunatic were telling me his anamnesis.Collection: Nymphs
...the soul does not require the organs of sense in order to see, hear, smell, taste and feel, in a much more perfect state; but with this great difference, that in such a state, it stands in much nearer connection with the spirtual than the material world.Collection: Order
Our intellect has created a new world that dominates nature, and has populated it with monstrous machines.Collection: Environmental
It is on the whole probably that we continually dream, but that consciousness makes such a noise that we do not hear it.Collection: Dream