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 awayโan 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.
Carl JungA sense of a wider meaning to one's existence is what raises a man beyond mere getting and spending. If he lacks this sense, he is lost and miserable.
Carl JungThat which you do not bring to consciousness comes to you as your Fate, that which you do bring to consciousness, whether it was what you thought you wanted or not, is your destiny.
Carl JungThe years... when I pursued the inner images were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything was then.
Carl JungWe need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself.
Carl JungThe dream arises from a part of the mind unknown to us, but none the less important, and is concerned with the desires for the approaching day.
Carl JungAnthropologists have often described what happens to a primitive society when its spiritual values are exposed to the impact of modern civilisation. Its people lose the meaning of their lives, their social organisation disintegrates, and they themselves morally decay. We are now in the same condition. But we have never really understood what we have lost, for our spiritual leaders unfortunately were more interested in protecting their institutions than in understanding the mystery that symbols present.
Carl JungArt is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.
Carl JungEven if the whole world were to fall to pieces, the unity of the psyche would never be shattered.
Carl JungHis retreat into himself is not a final renunciation of the world, but a search for quietude, where alone it is possible for him to make his contribution to the life of the community.
Carl JungNothing is more repulsive than a furtively prurient spirituality; it is just as unsavoury as gross sensuality.
Carl JungIt is also possible for the unconscious or an archetype to take complete possession of a man and to determine his fate down to the smallest detail
Carl JungThe sight of a childโฆwill arouse certain longings in adult, civilized persons โ longings which relate to the unfulfilled desires and needs of those parts of the personality which have been blotted out of the total picture in favor of the adapted persona.
Carl JungSomewhere there was once a Flower, a Stone, a Crystal, a Queen, a King, a Palace, a Lover and his Beloved, and this was long ago, on an Island somewhere in the ocean 5,000 years ago. . . . Such is Love, the Mystic Flower of the Soul. This is the Center, the Self.
Carl JungIt will seem as if you were making the visions banal โ but then you need to do that โ then you are freed from the power of them Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book and turn over the pages and for you it will be your church โ your cathedral โ the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them โ then you will lose your soul โ for in that book is your soul.
Carl JungThe decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life.
Carl Jung...anyone who attempts to do both, to adjust to his group and at the same time pursue his individual goal, becomes neurotic.
Carl JungYoga in Mayfair or Fifth Avenue, or in any other place which is on the telephone, is a spiritual fake.
Carl JungIt is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of courseโfor consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him.
Carl JungAt present we educate people only up to the point where they can earn a living and marry; then education ceases altogether, as though a complete mental outfit had been acquired. ... Vast numbers of men and women thus spend their entire lives in complete ignorance of the most important things.
Carl JungThe mind has grown to its present state of consciousness as an acorn grows into an oak, or as saurians developed into mammals.
Carl JungThe little world of childhood with its familiar surroundings is a model of the greater world. The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon the child, the more it will tend to feel and see its earlier miniature world again in the bigger world of adult life. Naturally this is not a conscious, intellectual process.
Carl JungA complex is a cluster of energy in the unconscious, charged by historic events, reinforced through repitition, embodying a fragment of our personality, and generating a programmed response and an implicit set of expectations.
Carl JungThe distinction between mind and body is an artificial dichotomy, a discrimination which is unquestionably based far more on the peculiarity of intellectual understanding than on the nature of things.
Carl JungBy a symbol I do not mean an allegory or a sign, but an image that describes in the best possible way the dimly discerned nature of the spirit. A symbol does not define or explain; it points beyond itself to a meaning that is darkly divined yet still beyond our grasp, and cannot be adequately expressed in the familiar words of our language.
Carl JungThe serious problems in life...are never fully solved. If ever they should appear to be so it is a sure sign that something has been lost. The meaning and purpose of a problem seem to lie not in its solution but in our working at it incessantly.
Carl JungIt is the function of the Church to oppose all original experience, because this can only be unorthodox.
Carl JungIf we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us. --"The Content of the Psychoses
Carl JungMany who know something but not enough about dreams and their meaning...are liable to succumb to the prejudice that the dream actually has a moral purpose, that it warns, rebukes, comforts, foretells the future, etc. If one believes that the unconscious always knows best, one can easily be betrayed into leaving the dreams to take the necessary decisions, and is then disappointed when the dreams become more and more trivial and meaningless...The unconscious functions satisfactorily only when the conscious mind fufills its task to the very limit.
Carl JungIt seems to be very hard for people to live with riddles or to let them live, although one would think that life is so full of riddles as it is that a few more things we cannot answer would make no difference. But perhaps it is just this that is so unendurable, that there are irrational things in our own psyche which upset the conscious mind in its illusory certainties by confronting it with the riddle of its existence.
Carl JungPrimitive superstition lies just below the surface of even the most tough-minded individuals, and it is precisely those who most fight against it who are the first to succumb to its suggestive effects.
Carl JungFrom the living fountain of instinct flows everything that is creative; hence the unconscious is not merely conditioned by history, but is the very source of the creative impulse. It is like nature herself - prodigiously conservative, and yet transcending her own historical conditions in her acts of creation.
Carl JungIn each of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves. When, therefore, we find ourselves in a difficult situation to which there is no solution, he can sometimes kindle a light that radically alters our attitude - the very attitude that led us into the difficult situation.
Carl Jung