Quotes from C.G. Jung

This increase in self-knowledge is still very rare nowadays and is usually paid for in advance with a neurosis, if not with something worse.

I only know there is no point in wishing to know more of the collective unconscious than one gets through dreams and intuition. The more you know of it, the greater and heavier becomes your moral burden, because the unconscious contents transform themselves into your individual tasks and duties as soon as they begin to become conscious. Do you want to find more and more complications and increasing responsibilities?

If we subtract from this statement a certain feeling of inferiority that is characteristic of the introvert, and add to it the fact that the "great world of ideas" is not so much ruled by the extravert as he himself is subject to it, then Schiller's plaint gives a striking picture of the poverty that tends to develop as the result of an essentially abstracting attitude.

The mass crushes out the insight and reflection that are still possible with the individual, and this necessarily leads to doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny if ever the constitutional State should succumb to a fit of weakness.

just as the wounder wounds himself, so the healer heals himself.

There were things in the images which concerned not only myself but many others also. It was then that I ceased to belong to myself alone

I myself recently dreamed that a UFO came speeding towards me which turned out to be the lens of a magic lantern whose projected image was myself; this suggested to me that I was the figure, himself deep in meditation, who is produced by a meditating yogi.

This idea of becoming a god is age-old. The old belief relegates it to the time after death, but the mystery cults bring it about in this world. An ancient Egyptian text represents it, very beautifully, as the triumphal song of the ascending soul:

From then on, my life belonged to the generality.

But if those sensual pleasures fail the person who desires and wishes for them, he will suffer, pierced by the arrow of pain.

El Occidente cristiano considera que el hombre depende por entero de la gracia divina o, por lo menos, de la Iglesia, único instrumento terrenal de la redención sancionado por Dios. Oriente, por el contrario, insiste una y otra vez en afirmar que el ser humano es el único responsable de su evolución espiritual. Oriente, en efecto, cree que es posible redimirse a sí mismo.

There is one more point to be made. The spirit of the age is in constant movement. It is like a river that flows on, invisibly but surely, and given the momentum of life in our century, even 10 years is a long time.

try to plant the results of my experience in the soil of reality;

The mouth utters the word, the sign, and the symbol. If the word is a sign, it means nothing. But if the word is a symbol, it means everything. When the way enters death and we are surround by rot and horror, the way rises in the darkness and leaves the mouth as the saving symbol, the word.

Here Job is voicing the torment of soul caused by the onslaught of unconscious desires; the libido festers in his flesh, a cruel God has overpowered him and pierced him through with barbed thoughts that agonize his whole being.

When religious symbols that are partly different from those we know emerge from the unconscious of an individual, it is often feared that these will wrongfully alter or diminish the officially recognized religious symbols. This fear even causes many people to reject analytical psychology and the entire unconscious.

The general undervaluation of the human soul is so great that neither the great religions nor the philosophies nor scientific rationalism have been willing to look at it twice.

Nada os salva de lo desordenado y lo carente de sentido, pues ésta es la otra mitad del mundo.»

St. Thomas himself recalls the saying of Aristotle that "the thing is the whiter, the less it is mixed with black,"45 without mentioning, however, that the reverse proposition: "the thing is the blacker, the less it is mixed with white," not only has the same validity as the first but is also its logical equivalent. He might also have mentioned that not only darkness is known through light, but that, conversely, light is known through darkness.

For that matter, does a thing or a fact ever mean anything in and of itself? We can only be sure that it is always the human being who interprets, that is, gives meaning to a fact. And that is the gist of the matter for psychology.

If I recognize only nat- uralistic values, and explain everything in physical terms, I shall depreciate, hinder, or even destroy the spiritual development of my patients. And if I hold exclusively to a spiritual interpretation, then I shall misunderstand and do violence to the nat- ural man in his right to exist as a physical being.

to profane those inexpressible feelings with stale sentimentalities.

The resemblance between the Prometheus of "Pandora" and the Prometheus of Spitteler ends here. He is merely a collective itch for action, so one-sided that it amounts to a repression of eroticism. His son Phileros ('lover of Eros') is simply erotic passion; for, as the son of his father, he must, as is often the case with children, re-enact under unconscious compulsion the unlived lives of his parents.

One could hardly call the things that have happened, and still happen, in the concentration camps of the dictator states an "accidental lack of perfection"—it would sound like mockery.