Quotes from C.G. Jung

A purely causalistic psychology is only able to reduce every human individual to a member of the species Home sapiens, since its range is limited to what is transmitted by heredity or derived from other sources. But a work of art is not transmitted or derived–it is a creative reorganization of those very conditions to which a causalistic psychology must always reduce it.

Be glad that you can recognize [your madness], for you will thus avoid becoming its victim.

Probably, as in all metaphysical questions, both are true: Life is or has meaning and meaninglessness. I cherish the anxious hope that meaning will preponderate and win the battle.

The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life.

Myth is the natural and indispensable intermediate stage between unconscious and conscious cognition.

Magic is a way of living. If one has done one's best to steer the chariot, and one then notices that a greater other is actually steering it, then magical operation takes place. One cannot say what the effect of magic will be, since no one can know it in advance because the magical is the lawless, which occurs without rules and by chance, so to speak. But the condition is that one totally accepts it and does not reject it, in order to transfer everything to the growth of the tree.

If the God is absolute beauty and goodness, how should he encompass the fullness of life, which is beautiful and hateful, good and evil, laughable and serious, human and inhuman? How can man live in the womb of the God if the Godhead himself attends only to one-half of him?

If, in doing this I should open the door to so-called "suggestion", I see no occasion for regret; it is well known that we are susceptible only to those suggestions with which we are already secretly in accord.

No harm is done if now and then one goes astray in this riddle-reading. Sooner or later the psyche rejects the mistake, much as an organism does a foreign body. I need not try to prove that my dream interpretation is correct, which would be a somewhat hopeless undertaking, but must simply help the patient to find what it is that activates him—I was almost betrayed into saying what is actual.

The truth is that poets are human beings, and what a poet has to say about his work is often far from being the most illuminating word on the subject. What is required of us, then, is nothing less than to defend the importance of the visionary experience against the poet himself.

But what will he do when he sees only too clearly why his patient is ill; when he sees that it arises from having no love, only sexuality; no faith, because he is afraid to grope in the dark; no hope, because he is disillusioned by the world and by life; and no understanding, because he has failed to read the meaning of his own existence.

We allow the images to rise up, and maybe we wonder about them, but that is all. We do not take the trouble to understand them, let alone draw ethical conclusions from them. This stopping-short conjures up the negative effects of the unconscious.

My aim is to bring about a psychic state in which my patient begins to experiment with his own nature—a state of fluidity, change and growth, in which there is no longer anything eternally fixed and hopelessly petrified.

However far-fetched it may sound, experience shows that many neuroses are caused by the fact that people blind themselves to their own religious promptings because of a childish passion for rational enlightenment.

The psychologist of today ought to realize once and for all that we are no longer dealing with questions of dogma and creed. A religious attitude is an element in psychic life whose importance can hardly be overrated. And it is precisely for the religious outlook that the sense of historical continuity is indispensable.

Sensation establishes what is actually given, thinking enables us to recognize its meaning, feeling tells us its value, and finally intuition points to the possibilities of the whence and whither that lie within the immediate facts. In this way, we can orientate ourselves with respect to the immediate world as completely as when we locate a place geographically by latitude and longitude.

About 50 percent of politics is definitely obnoxious in as much as it poisons the utterly incompetent mind of the masses. We are on our guard against contagious diseases of the body, but we are exasperatingly careless when it comes to the even more dangerous collective diseases of the mind.

Intuition does not say what things 'mean' but sniffs out their possibilities. 'Meaning' is given by thinking.

Ne înÅŸel?m dac? credem c? inconÅŸtientul este ceva inofensiv … Desigur, el nu este primejdios în orice condiÅ£ii; dar de îndat? ce apare o nevroz?, acesta e un semn c? în inconÅŸtient exist? o acumulare de energie, adic? un fel de înc?rc?tur? care poate exploda … S?p?m cumva ca s? d?m de o fântân? artezian? ÅŸi risc?m s? ne izbim de un vulcan.

This kind of for-getfulness was called repression, and is the normal mechanism by which nature protects the individual from such painful feelings as are caused by unpleasant and unacceptable experiences and thoughts, the recognition of his egoistic nature, and the often quite unbearable conflict of his weaknesses with his feelings of idealism.

The gods are mighty and they bear their diversity, because like the stars the stand in solitude and are separated by vast distances one from the other. Humans are weak and cannot bear their own diversity, because they live close to each other and are desirous of company, so that they cannot bear their own distinct separateness.

The whole work lies in the solution

More accurately, the ego is in fact supplemented, not replaced, by the self. For the aim of both Gnosticism and therapy is, once again, the integration of ego consciousness with the unconscious, not the rejection of either one for the other: When, in treating a case of neurosis, we try to supplement the inadequate attitude (or adaptedness)

The tomb in which our king is buried is called . . . Saturn"*