Carl Jung

The gods have become our diseases.

I am not what has happened to me, I am who I choose to become.

I could not say I believe. I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God.

There's no coming to consciousness without pain.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

We are not what happened to us,
we are what we wish to become.

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.

The dream gives a true picture of the subjective state, while the conscious mind denies that this state exists, or recognizes it only grudgingly.

But when a thing is tangibly idiotic, you can be sure that it is very powerful, very dangerous. You see, when we call a thing stupid, we think that we undo it, that we have overcome it somehow. Of course nothing of the sort happens; we have simply made a statement that it is very important, have advertised it, and it appeals to everybody. People think, thank heaven, here is something we can understand, and they eat it. But if we say something is very intelligent, they vanish and won't touch it.

We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of the wheel depends. We turn clay to make a vessel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of the vessel depends. We pierce doors and windows to make a house; And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the utility of the house depends. Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the utility of what is not. [Ch. XL]

The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble…. They can never be solved, but only outgrown…. This ‘outgrowing’, as I formerly called it, on further experience was seen to consist in a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person’s horizon, and through this widening of view, the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life-tendency.

One book opens another.

Modern man does not understand how much his “rationalism” (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic “underworld.” He has freed himself from “superstition” (or so he believes), but in the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively dangerous degree. His moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated, and he is now paying the price for this break-up in worldwide disorientation and dissociation.

The sad truth is that man's real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites — day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.