As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.
Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.
How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole
Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.
Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.
The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith.
When you are up against a wall, put down roots like a tree, until clarity comes from deeper sources to see over that wall and grow.
Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.
Astrology is assured of recognition from psychology, without further restrictions, because astrology represents the summation of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity.
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next.
Nights through dreams tell the myths forgotten by the day.
The girl dreams she is dangerously ill. Suddenly birds come out of her skin and cover her completely … Swarms of gnats obscure the sun, the moon, and all the stars except one. That one start falls upon the dreamer.
We have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.
The Wrong we have Done, Thought, or Intended Will wreak its Vengeance onOur SOULS.
My friends, it is wise to nourish the soul, otherwise you will breed dragons and devils in your heart.
The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
We are still living in a wonderful new world where man thinks himself astonishingly new and “modern.” This is unmistakable proof of the youthfulness of human consciousness, which has not yet grown aware of its historical antecedents.
If you think along the lines of Nature then you think properly.” from the video “Carl Jung speaks about death
I never think that I am the one who must see to it that cherries grow on stalks
In spite of our proud domination of nature, we are still her victims, for we have not even learned to control our nature.
There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
If only a world-wide consciousness could arise that all division and fission are due to the splitting of opposites in the psyche, then we should know where to begin.
The State in particular is turned into a quasi-animate personality from whom everything is expected. In reality it is only a camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it.
Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.
As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.
Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event.
Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.
Sensation tell us a thing is.Thinking tell us what it is this thing is.Feeling tells us what this thing is to us.
To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is.
The stone has no uncertainties, no urge to communicate, and is eternally the same for thousands of years, while I am only a passing phenomenon which bursts into all kinds of emotions, like a flame that flares up quickly and then goes out.
”…the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
The psychopathology of the masses is rooted in the psychology of the individual
…the mind that is collectively orientated is quite incapable of thinking and feeling in any other way than by projection.
To be quite accurate, human nature is simply what it is; it has its dark and its light sides. The sum of all colours is grey – light on a dark background or dark on light.
As understanding deepens, the further removed it becomes from knowledge.
We all feel that the opposite of our own highest principle must be purely destructive, deadly, and evil. We refuse to endow it with any positive life-force; hence we avoid and fear it.
But the shadow is merely somewhat inferior, primitive, unadapted, and awkward; not wholly bad. It even contains childish or primitive qualities which would in a way vitalize and embellish human existence, but convention forbids!
People think you have only to ‘tell’ a person that he ‘ought’ to do something in order to put him on the right track. But whether he can or will do it is another matter.
I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud. ”—Psychiatrist Dr. Carl Jung in a 1919 address to the Society for Psychical Research in England
There is a desert on the moon where the dreamer sinks so deeply into the ground that she reaches hell.
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.
The mass State has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual.
That we are bound to the earth does not mean that we cannot grow; on the contrary it is the sine qua non of growth. No noble, well-grown tree ever disowned its dark roots, for it grows not only upward but downward as well.
I simply believe that some part of the human Self or Soul is not subject to the laws of space and time.
The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.
When an inner situation is not made conscious it appears outside as fate.
What is not brought to consciousness, comes to us as fate.
The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.
The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.Carl JungSwiss psychologist (1875 – 1961)
In each of us there is another whom we do not know.Carl Jungfound in David Eagleman’s book: Incognito
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
Not your thinking, but your being, is distinctiveness. Therefore not after difference,ye think it, must ye strive; but after YOUR OWN BEING. At bottom, therefore, there is only one striving, namely, the striving after your own being.
I find that all my thoughts circle around God like the planets around the sun, and are as irresistibly attracted by Him. I would feel it to be the grossest sin if I were to oppose any resistance to this force.
The ideas of the moral order and of God belong to the ineradicable substrate of the human soul.
If it be true that there can be no metaphysics transcending human reason, it is no less true that there can be no empirical knowledge that is not already caught and limited by the a priori structure of cognition.
What happens after death is so glorious that our imagination, our feelings do not suffice to form even an approimate conception of it. Memories and Dreams,Carl Jung
Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.
I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it.
Man is much more the victim of his psychic constitution than its inventor.
In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us.
Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations…
The time is a critical one, for it marks the beginning of the second half of life, when a metanoia, a mental transformation, not infrequently occurs.(on being 36 yrs old)
I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.
About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times.
If you go to thinking take your heart with you. If you go to love, take your head with you. Love is empty without thinking, thinking hollow without love
When, for instance, a highly esteemed professor in his seventies abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress, we know that the gods have claimed another victim.
The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.
We often dream about people from whom we receive a letter by the next post. I have ascertained on several occasions that at the moment when the dream occurred the letter was already lying in the post-office of the addressee.
Synchronicity could be understood as an ordering system by means of which “similar” things coincide, without there being any apparent cause.
Know all the theories, master all the techniques, but as you touch a human soul be just another human soul.
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.
I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once and cannot add up the sum.