People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a stric… - Carl Jung

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn the literature of the whole world—all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls. Thus the soul has gradually been turned into a Nazareth from which nothing good can come.

People don't have ideas. Ideas have people.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

Consciousness naturally resists anything unconscious and unknown. I have already pointed out the existence among primitive peoples of what anthropologists call “misoneism,” a deep and superstitious fear of novelty. The primitives manifest all the reactions of the wild animal against untoward events. But “civilized” man reacts to new ideas in much the same way, erecting psychological barriers to protect himself from the shock of facing something new.