Quotes About Balance

Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.

Man becomes whole, integrated, calm, fertile, and happy when (and only when) the process of individuation is complete, when the conscious and the unconscious have learned to live at peace and to complement one another.

But there is no energy unless there is a tension of opposites; hence it is necessary to discover the opposite to the attitude of the conscious mind.

If you go to thinking take your heart with you. If you go to love, take your head with you. Love is empty without thinking, thinking hollow without love.

Is it worth the lion's while to terrify the mouse?

How difficult it is to reach anything approaching a moderate and relatively calm point of view in the midst of one's emotions.

Like plants, so men also grow, some in the light, others in the shadows. There are many who need the shadows and not the light.

We should grow like a tree that likewise does not know its law. We tie ourselves up with intentions, not mindful of the fact that intention is the limitation, yes, the exclusion of life.

There is no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert. Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum.

The psyche is a self-regulating system that maintains itself in equilibrium as the body does.

Nothing so promotes the growth of consciousness as [the] inner confrontation of opposites.

My friends, it is wise to nourish the soul, otherwise you will breed dragons and devils in your heart.

Good does not become better by being exaggerated, but worse, and a small evil becomes a big one through being disregarded and repressed. The Shadow is very much a part of human nature, and it is only at night that no shadows exist.

To be quite accurate, human nature is simply what it is; it has its dark and its light sides. The sum of all colours is grey - light on a dark background or dark on light.

Anything can be settled by an intellect that is not subject to the control of feeling—and yet the intellectual still suffers from a neurosis if feeling is undeveloped.

Dreams are, after all, compensations for the conscious attitude.

Seek the coldness of the moon and ye shall find the heat of the sun.

Civilized life today demands concentrated, directed conscious functioning, and this entails the risk of a considerable dissociation from the unconscious. The further we are able to remove ourselves from the unconscious through directed functioning, the more readily a powerful counterposition can build up in the unconscious, and when this breaks out it may have disagreeable consequences.

For the sake of mental stability and even physiological health, the unconscious and the conscious must be integrally connected and thus move on parallel lines. If they are split apart or "dissociated," psychological disturbance follows.

If you marry the ordered to the chaos you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning beyond meaning and meaninglessness.

Culture lies beyond the purpose of nature.

There is an answer. There is a meeting point between containment and liberation, and we can find it in the rites of initiation that I have been discussing. They can make it possible for individuals, or whole groups of people, to unite the opposing forces within themselves and achieve an equilibrium in their lives.

If the unconscious can be recognized as a co-determining factor along with consciousness, and if we can live in such a way that conscious and unconscious demands are taken into account as far as possible, then the centre of gravity of the total personality shifts its position. It is then no longer in the ego, which is merely the centre of consciousness, but in the hypothetical point between conscious and unconscious. This new centre might be called the self.

There is no consciousness without the discrimination of opposites.