Quotes About Symbols

ZOS and Scire had a fierce argument as to who had been to the Witches' Sabbath, what the Witches' Sabbath actually was, and so on. Scire drew his magical athame and showed ZOS the strange characters on the hilt. ZOS should have blanched before them but he didn't, saying he "knew all them symbols and more

This year, as we celebrate the 230th anniversary of America's independence, please remember the symbols that are sacred to this country. Fly Old Glory high and show your respect and admiration for this great nation and the values we hold dear.

The language and the "people" of the unconscious are symbols, and the means of communications dreams. Thus an examination of Man and his Symbols is in effect an examination of man's relation to his own unconscious. And since in Jung's view the unconscious is the great guide, friend, and adviser of the conscious, this book is related in the most direct terms to the study of human beings and their spiritual problems.

Everything to come was already in images: to find their soul, the ancients went into the desert. This is an image. The ancients lived their symbols, since the world had not yet become real for them. Thus they went into the solitude of the desert to teach us that the place of the soul is a lonely desert.

Nights through dreams tell the myths forgotten by the day.

We have let the house our fathers built fall into decay, and now we try to break into Oriental palaces that our fathers never knew. Anyone who has lost the historical symbols and cannot be satisfied with substitutes is certainly in a very difficult position today: before him there yawns the void, and he turns away from it in horror. What is worse, the vacuum gets filled with absurd political and social ideas, which one and all are distinguished by their spiritual bleakness.

Myths, however, consist of symbols that were not invented but happened.

there is good reason for supposing that the archetypes are the unconscious images of the instincts themselves, in other words, that they are patterns of instinctual behaviour.

The underlying, primary psychic reality is so inconceivably complex that it can be grasped only at the farthest reach of intuition, and then but very dimly. That is why it needs symbols.

It is true that there are dreams and single symbols (I should prefer to call them "motifs") that are typical and often occur. Among such motifs are falling, flying, being persecuted by dangerous animals or hostile men, being insufficiently or absurdly clothed in public places, being in a hurry or lost in a milling crowd, fighting with useless weapons or being wholly defenseless, running hard yet getting nowhere.

Since faith revolves round those central and perennially important "dominant ideas" which alone give life a meaning, the prime task of the psychotherapist must be to understand the symbols anew, and thus to understand the unconscious, compensatory striving of his patient for an attitude that reflects the totality of the psyche.

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 interpretation of dreams and symbols demands intelligence. It cannot be turned into a mechanical system and then crammed into unimaginative brains. It demands both an increasing knowledge of the dreamer's individuality and an increasing self-awareness on the part of the interpreter

The instinctual impulse that was trying to rouse the dreamer from the sleep of childhood was opposed by a personal pride that was distinctly out of place, and also, one must suppose, by a correspondingly narrow moral horizon, so that there was nothing to help her understand the spiritual content of the symbols.

In earlier ages, as instinctive concepts welled up in the mind of man, his conscious mind could no doubt integrate them into a coherent psychic pattern. But the "civilized" man is no longer able to do this. His "advanced" consciousness has deprived itself of the means by which the auxiliary contributions of the instincts and the unconscious can be assimilated. These organs of assimilation and integration were numinous symbols, held holy by common consent.

Not only Christianity with its symbols of salvation, but all religions, including the primitive with their magical rituals are forms of psychotherapy which treat and heal the suffering of the soul, and the suffering of the body caused by the soul.

Even the most absurd things are nothing other than symbols for thoughts which are not only understandable in human terms but dwell in every human breast. In intensity we do not discover anything new and unknown; we are looking at the foundations of our own being, the matrix of those vital problems on which we are all engaged.

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

Los antiguos vivían sus signos porque el mundo aún no se les había vuelto real.

Thus, what we call "symbols of transcendence" are the symbols that represent man's striving to attain this goal. They provide the means by which the contents of the unconscious can enter the conscious mind, and they also are themselves an active expression of those contents.

There is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are older than the historical man, which are inborn in him from the earliest times, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them.

the really complex and unfamiliar part of the human mind, from which symbols are produced, is still virtually unexplored. It seems almost incredible that though we receive signals from it every night, deciphering these communications seems too tedious for any but a very few people to be bothered with. Man's greatest instrument, his psyche, is little thought of, and it is often directly mistrusted and despised. "It's only psychological" too often means: It is nothing.

The core of an individual is the mystery of life, which dies when it is 'grasped'. That is also why symbols want to keep their secrets.

We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard defining edges.