Carl Jung Quotes

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. There they found the abundance of visions, the fruits of the desert, the wondrous flowers of the soul. Think diligently about the images that the ancients have left behind. They show the way of what is to come. Look back at the collapse of empires, growth and death, of the desert and monasteries, they are the images of what is to come. Everything has been foretold. But who knows how to interpret it?

When you say that the place of the soul is not, then it is not. But if you say that it is, then it is. Notice what the ancients said in images: the words is a creative act. The ancients said: in the beginning was the Word. Consider this and think upon it.

The words that oscillate between nonsense and supreme meaning are the oldest and truest.

Nature has no use for the plea that one 'did not know'.

Finché non prenderai coscienza l'inconscio governerà la tua vita.
E tu lo chiamerai destino.

The erotic instinct is something questionable, and will always be so whatever a future set of laws may have to say on the matter. It belongs, on the one hand, to the original animal nature of man, which will exist as long as man has an animal body. On the other hand, it is connected with the highest forms of the spirit. But it blooms only when the spirit and instinct are in true harmony. If one or the other aspect is missing, then an injury occurs, or at least there is a one-sided lack of balance which easily slips into the pathological. Too much of the animal disfigures the civilized human being, too much culture makes a sick animal.

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

The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.

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.

Nobody can fall so low unless he has a great depth.

If such a thing can happen to a man, it challenges his best and highest on the other side; that is to say, this depth corresponds to a potential height, and the blackest darkness to a hidden light.

When a person tries to obey the unconscious, he will often, as we have seen, be unable to do just as he pleases. But equally he will often be unable to do what other people want him to do. It often happens, for instance, that he must separate from his group-from his family, his partner, or other personal connections-in order to find himself. That is why it is sometimes said that attending to the unconscious makes people antisocial and egocentric. As a rule this is not true, for there is a little-known factor that enters into this attitude: the collective (or, we could even say, social) aspect of the Self.

It is painful — there is no denying it — to interpret radiant things from the shadow-side, and thus in a measure reduce them to their origins in dreary filth. But it seems to me to be an imperfection in things of beauty, and a weakness in man, if an explanation from the shadow-side has a destructive effect.

The more one sees of human fate and the more one examines its secret springs of action, the more one is impressed by the strength of unconscious motives and by the limitations of free choice

Life calls, not for perfection, but for completeness.

But what a dreary world it would be if the rules were not violated sometimes!

The meaning and design of a problem seem not to lie in its solution, but in our working at it incessantly.