Quotes from C.G. Jung

As long as concepts are identical with mere words, the variation is almost imperceptible and plays no practical role. But when an exact definition or a careful explanation is needed, one can occasionally discover the most amazing variations, not only in the purely intellectual understanding of the term, but particularly in its emotional tone and its application. As a rule, these variations are subliminal and therefore never realized.

Man today is painfully aware of the fact that neither his great religions nor his various philosophies seem to provide him with those powerful animating ideas that would give him the security he needs in face of the present condition of the world.

When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

Schiller was also aware that the two functions, thinking and affectivity (feeling-sensation), can take one another's place, which happens, as we saw, when one function is privileged:

The sensation type is in every respect the converse of the intuitive. He relies almost exclusively on his sense impressions, and his whole psychology is oriented by instinct and sensation. He is therefore entirely dependent on external stimuli.

I was unable to understand how a perfectly rational argument could meet with such emotional resistance.

Até você se tornar consciente, o inconsciente irá dirigir sua vida e você vai chamá-lo de destino

Every concept in our conscious mind, in short, has its own psychic associations. While such associations may vary in intensity (according to the relative importance of the concept to our whole personality, or according to the other ideas and even complexes to which it is associated in our unconscious), they are capable of changing the "normal" character of that concept. It may even become something quite different as it drifts below the level of consciousness.

That is why it is so extremely important to tell children fairytales and legends, and to inculcate religious ideas (dogmas) into grown-ups, because these things are instrumental symbols with whose help unconscious contents can be canalized into consciousness, interpreted, and integrated. Failing this, their energy flows off into conscious contents which, normally, are not much emphasized, and intensifies them to pathological proportions

Jung's search for the soul, then, stands at one with the search for appropriately dialogical and differentiated language.

I had the distinct feeling that they were something central, and in time I acquired through them a living conception of the self.

Humanity is arming itself, in dread and fascinated horror, for a stupendous crime.

The redeeming symbol is a highway, a way upon which life can move forward without torment and compulsion.

What we call a symbol is a term, a name, or even a picture that may be familiar in daily life, yet that possesses specific connotations in addition to its conventional and obvious meaning. It implies something vague, unknown, or hidden from us.

A rapprochement between empirical science and religious experience would in my opinion be fruitful for both. Harm can result only if one side or the other remains unconscious of the limitations of its claim to validity.

whatever form it takes, the function of the shadow is to represent the opposite side of the ego and to embody just those qualities that one dislikes most in other people.

Thus a word or an image is symbolic when it implies something more than its obvious and immediate meaning.

In my opinion, faith does not exclude thought (which is man's strongest weapon), but unfortunately many believers seem to be afraid of science (and incidentally of psychology) that they turn a blind eye to the numinous psychic powers that forever control man's fate. We have stripped all things of their mystery and numinosity; nothing is holy any longer.

So long as a symbol is a living thing, it is the expression for something that cannot be characterized in any other or better way. The symbol is alive only so long as it is pregnant with meaning. But once its meaning has been born out of it, once that expression is found which formulates the thing sought, expected, or divined even better than the hitherto accepted symbol, then the symbol is dead, i.e., it possesses only an historical significance

As the mind explores the symbol, it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason.

Here again it is obvious that Schiller is writing, as always, only from the standpoint of the introvert. The extravert, whose ego resides not in thinking but in the feeling relation to the object, actually finds himself through the object, whereas the introvert loses himself in it.

This argument illustrates the way in which archetypes appear in practical experience: They are, at the same time, both images and emotions. One can speak of an archetype only when these two aspects are simultaneous. When there is merely the image, then there is simply a word-picture of little consequence. But by being charged with emotion, the image gains numinosity (or psychic energy); it becomes dynamic, and consequences of some kind must flow from it.

nou? tuturor ne merge ca fratelui Medardus din Elixirele diavolului a lui E.T.A. Hoffman: exist? undeva un frate neliniÈ™titor, groaznic, adic? o replic? a noastr? în persoan?, legat? de noi prin sânge, care conÈ›ine È™i adun? cu r?utate tot ceea ce noi am vrea din toat? inima s? dispar? sub mas?.

the greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble… They can never be solved, but only outgrown…What on a lower level had led to the wildest conflicts and to emotions full of panic, viewed from the higher-level of the personality now seemed like a storm in a valley seen from a high mountain top. This does not mean that the thunderstorm is robbed of its reality; it means that, instead of being in it, one is now above it.