Carl Jung Quotes

There is rarely a creative man who does not have to pay a high price for the divine spark of his greatest gifts...the human element is frequently bled for the benefit of the creative element and to such an extent that it even brings out the bad qualities, as for instance, ruthless, naive egoism (so-called "auto-eroticism"), vanity, all kinds of vices—and all this in order to bring to the human I at least some life-strength, since otherwise it would perish of sheer inanition.

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.

At first we cannot see beyond the path that leads downward to dark and hateful things — but no light or beauty will ever come from the man who cannot bear this sight. Light is always born of darkness, and the sun never yet stood still in heaven to satisfy man's longing or to still his fears.

the goal of psychic development is the self. There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the self.

The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

It is the truth, a force of nature that expresses itself through me — I am only a channel — I can imagine in many instances where I would become sinister to you.

For instance, if life had led you to take up an artificial attitude, then you wouldn't be able to stand me, because I am a natural being.

By my very presence I crystallize; I am a ferment.

The unconscious of people who live in an artificial manner senses me as a danger.

Everything about me irritates them, my way of speaking, my way of laughing.

They sense nature.

Faith, hope, love, and insight are the highest achievements of human effort. They are found-given-by experience.

Is that which science calls the “psyche” not merely a question-mark arbitrarily confined within the skull, but rather a door that opens upon the human world from a world beyond, now and again allowing strange and unseizable potencies to act upon him and to remove him, as if upon the wings of the night, from the level of common humanity to that of a more personal vocation?

Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away — an ephemeral apparition. 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.

We must remember that the rationalistic attitude of the West is not the only possible one and is not all-embracing, but is in many ways a prejudice and a bias that ought perhaps to be corrected.

We know as little of a supreme being as of Matter. But there is as little doubt of the existence of a supreme being as of Matter. The world beyond is reality, and experiential fact. We only don't understand it.

When you succeed in awakening the Kundalini, so that it starts to move out of its mere potentiality, you necessarily start a world which is totally different from our world. It is the world of eternity.

We must not underestimate the devastating effect of getting lost in the chaos, even if we know that it is the 'sine qua non' of any regeneration of the spirit and the personality.

Every step closer to my soul excites the scornful laughter of my devils, those cowardly ear-whisperers and poison-mixers. It was easy for them to laugh, since I had to do strange things.