Quotes from C.G. Jung

teachings about the "infantile-perverse-criminal" unconscious have led people to make a dangerous monster out of the unconscious, that really very natural thing. As if all that is good, reasonable, beautiful and worth living for had taken up its abode in consciousness!

I began to understand that the goal of psychic development is the self. There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the self.

For underlying all philosophies and all religions are the facts of the human soul, which may ultimately be the arbiters of truth and error.

The thread by which our fate hangs is wearing thin. Not nature, but the "genius of mankind," has knotted the hangman's noose with which it can execute itself at any moment. This is simply another façon de parler for what John called the "wrath of God." 735

Were not the autonomy of the individual the secret longing of many people it would scarcely be able to survive the collective suppression either morally or spiritually.

We should never forget that in any psychological discussion we are not saying anything about the psyche, but that the psyche is always speaking about itself. It is no use thinking we can ever get beyond the psyche by means of the "mind," even though the mind asserts that it is not dependent on the psyche. How could it prove that?

My aim was to show that delusions and hallucinations were not just specific symptoms of mental disease but also had a human meaning.

Certainly this is an animated world, a world of the simplest things. No world of will-be or must-be, it seems to me, rather a world of maybe with entirely undetermined possibilities, a world of colorful twilight. It seems as if there are only modest waysides here, close at hand, no distant targets, no broad straight military roads. No heaven above, no hell below. A strange world in between--everything merges in soft shades--a colorful painting, harmonically fused in itself.

Nobody can spare themselves the waiting and most will be unable to bear this torment, but will throw themselves with greed back at men, things, and thoughts, whose slaves they will become

Toute passe–yesterday's truth is to-day's deception, and yesterday's false inference may be to-morrow's revelation.

For every manifest case of insanity there are, in my estimation, at least ten latent cases who seldom get to the point of breaking out openly but whose views and behavior, for all their appearance of normality, are influenced by unconsciously morbid and perverse factors.

theologians are different in this respect, at any rate; at least they are sure that God exists, even though they make contradictory statements about Him.

There is no Archimedean point from which to judge, since the psyche is indistinguishable from its manifestations. The psyche is the object of psychology, and -fatally enough- also its subject. There is no getting away from this fact. "Psychology and Religion" (1938). In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. P.8

I knew that I had to find the answer out of my deepest self

man is indispensable for the completion of creation; that, in fact, he himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence

the grief a man feels when he is forced to sacrifice his ideal and his conscious attitudes.

My thoughts are not my self but exactly like the things of the world, alive and dead. Just as I am not damaged through living in a partly chaotic world, so too I am not damaged if I live in my partly chaotic thought world. Thoughts are natural events that you do not possess, and whose meaning you only imperfectly recognize.

An intelligent man will make his adaptation to the world through his intelligence, and not in the manner of a sixth-rate pugilist, even though now and then, in a fit of rage, he may make use of his fists. In the struggle for existence and adaptation everyone instinctively uses his most developed function, which thus becomes the criterion of his habitual reactions.

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.

whenever the emotion had reached its climax, suddenly it swung around and there followed a cosmic stillness. At such times I was remote from everything, and what had only a moment before excited me seemed to belong to a distant past.

for she belonged to that class of human beings of whom spiritual activity is demanded

Only in our creative acts do we step forth into the light and see ourselves whole and complete.

To be "unhistorical" is the Promethean sin, and in this sense the modern man is sinful. A higher level of consciousness is like a burden of guilt!

It is precisely the most subjective ideas which, being closest to nature and to the living being, deserve to be called the truest.