Carl Jung Quotes
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Whether you call the principle of existence "God," "matter," "energy," or anything else you like, you have created nothing; you have merely changed a symbol. Eastern and Western Thinking, 1938
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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.
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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.
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From the living fountain of instinct flows everything that is creative; hence the unconscious is not merely conditioned by history, but is the very source of the creative impulse. It is like nature herself - prodigiously conservative, and yet transcending her own historical conditions in her acts of creation.
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It will seem as if you were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then you are freed from the power of them Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book and turn over the pages and for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your soul — for in that book is your soul.
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By a symbol I do not mean an allegory or a sign, but an image that describes in the best possible way the dimly discerned nature of the spirit. A symbol does not define or explain; it points beyond itself to a meaning that is darkly divined yet still beyond our grasp, and cannot be adequately expressed in the familiar words of our language.
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I've realized that somebody who's tired and needs a rest, and goes on working all the same is a fool.
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For better to come, good must stand aside.
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It had become clear to me, in a flash of illumination, that for me the only possible goal was psychiatry. Here alone the two currents of my interest could flow together and in a united stream dig their own bed. Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found. Here at last was the place where the collision of nature and spirit became a reality.
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I think there will be a reaction - a reaction will set in against this communal dissociation. You know, man doesn't stand forever, his nullification. Once, there will be a reaction, and I see it setting in, you know, when I think of my patients, they all seek their own existence and to assure their existence against that complete atomization into nothingness or into meaninglessness. Man cannot stand a meaningless life.
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The whole point of Jesus's life was not that we should become exactly like him, but that we should become ourselves in the same way he became himself. Jesus was not the great exception but the great example.
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I cannot define for you what God is. I can only say that my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern has at its disposal the greatest of all his energies for transformation and transfiguration of his natural being. Not only the meaning of his life but his renewal and his institutions depend on his conscious relationship with this pattern of his collective unconscious.
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The Self then functions as a union of opposites and thus constitutes the most immediate experience of the Divine which it is psychologically possible to imagine
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Therein lies the social significance of art: It is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is more lacking. The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious, which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present. The artist seizes on this image and, in raising it from deepest unconsciousness, he brings it into relation with conscious values, thereby transforming it until it can be accepted by the minds of his contemporaries according to their powers.
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No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.
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You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible to influence.
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When we assume God to be a guiding principle well, sure enough, a god is usually characteristic of a certain system of thought or morality. For instance, take the Christian God, the summum bonum: God is love, love being the highest moral principle; and God is spirit, the spirit being the supreme idea of meaning. All our Christian moral concepts derive from such assumptions, and the supreme essence of all of them is what we call God.
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In each 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 the way 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.
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To be normal is the ultimate aim of the unsuccessful.
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There is rarely a creative man who does not have to pay a high price for the divine spark of his greatest gifts... the human element is frequently bled for the benefit of the creative element and to such an extent that it even brings out the bad qualities, as for instance, ruthless, naive egoism (so-called "auto-eroticism"), vanity, all kinds of vices-and all this in order to bring to the human I at least some life-strength, since otherwise it would perish of sheer inanition.
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Modern man is sick because he is not whole.
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Special knowledge is a terrible disadvantage.
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The girl dreams she is dangerously ill. Suddenly birds come out of her skin and cover her completely ... Swarms of gnats obscure the sun, the moon, and all the stars except one. That one start falls upon the dreamer.
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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.
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We have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.
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I could well imagine that I might have lived in former centuries and there encountered questions I was not yet able to answer; that I had been born again because I had not fulfilled the task given to me.
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Nothing affects the life of a child so much as the unlived life of its parent
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Criticism can be effective when there is something that must be destroyed or dissolved, but it is capable only of harm when there is something to be built.
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We can keep from a child all knowledge of earlier myths, but we cannot take from him the need for mythology.
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Even if the whole world were to fall to pieces, the unity of the psyche would never be shattered.
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