The symbols of the self arise in the depths of the body, and they express its materiality every bit as much as the perceiving consciousness. The symbol is thus a living body
The heaping together of paintings by Old Masters in museums is a catastrophe; likewise, a collection of a hundred Great Brains makes one big fathead.
It 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 course—for 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.
To be normal is the ultimate aim of the unsuccessful.
The word 'happiness' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced and contrasted and compared to sadness. In comparing how an experience could have been worse we develop gratitude and happiness, while if we compare it how it could have been better we develop bitterness and sadness.
There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.
Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own.
You are the only one who has to live your life.
Without playing with fantasy, no creative work has yet come into being.
If only simplicity were not the most difficult of all things. It consists of watching objectively the development of any fragment of fantasy.
Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.
The descent into the depths always seems to precede the ascent.
Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.
I studiously avoided all so-called "holy men." I did so because I had to make do with my own truth, not accept from others what I could not attain on my own. I would have felt it as a theft had I attempted to learn from the holy men and to accept their truth for myself. Neither in Europe can I make any borrowings from the East, but must shape my life out of myself-out of what my inner being tells me, or what nature brings to me.
Most people of action are inclined to fatalism and most of thought believe in providence.
How can anyone see straight when he does not see himself and the darkness he unconsciously carries with him into all his dealings?
The biographies of great artists make it abundantly clear that the creative urge is often so imperious that it battens on their humanity and yokes everything to the service of the work, even at the cost of health and ordinary human happiness. The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle.
Life is teleology par excellence; it is the intrinsic striving towards a goal, and the living organism is a system of directed aims which seek to fulfill themselves.
The collective unconscious consists of the sum of the instincts and their correlates, the archetypes. Just as everybody possesses instincts, so he also possesses a stock of archetypal images.
Liverpool is the pool of life, it makes to live.
New ideas are not only the enemies of old ones; they also appear often in an extremely unacceptable form.
Your ultimate goal in life is to become your best self. Your immediate goal is to get on the path that will lead you there.
The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.
Protection and security are only valuable if they do not cramp life excessively.
Naturally, every age thinks that all ages before it were prejudiced, and today we think this more than ever and are just as wrong as all previous ages that thought so. How often have we not seen the truth condemned! It is sad but unfortunately true that man learns nothing from history.
Dreams are symbolic in order that they cannot be understood; in order that the wish, which is the source of the dream, may remain unknown.
Life really does begin at forty. Up until then, you are just doing research.
Hitler is a medicine man type of leader.
I think there will be a reaction - a reaction will set in against this communal dissociation. You know, man doesn't stand forever, his nullification. Once, there will be a reaction, and I see it setting in, you know, when I think of my patients, they all seek their own existence and to assure their existence against that complete atomization into nothingness or into meaninglessness. Man cannot stand a meaningless life.
Trust that which gives you meaning and accept it as your guide
Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.
Whenever we touch nature we get clean. People who have got dirty through too much civilization take a walk in the woods, or a bath in the sea. Entering the unconscious, entering yourself through dreams, is touching nature from the inside and this is the same thing, things are put right again.
The great problems of life — sexuality, of course, among others — are always related to the primordial images of the collective unconscious. These images are really balancing or compensating factors which correspond with the problems life presents in actuality. This is not to be marveled at, since these images are deposits representing the accumulated experience of thousands of years of struggle for adaptation and existence.
How difficult it is to reach anything approaching a moderate and relatively calm point of view in the midst of one's emotions.
Becoming conscious is of course a sacrilege against nature; it is as though you had robbed the unconscious of something.
Thank God I'm not a Jungian.
No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.
Nobody doubts the importance of conscious experience; why then should we doubt the significance of unconscious happenings? They also are part of our life, and sometimes more truly a part of it for weal or woe than any happenings of the day.
Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of awareness of darkness... as the contrast between what we have and how it could be worse is vital to appreciate anything, including our life, and so be happy and grateful
A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.
When you respond to an unreasonable person by getting emotional, you give them victory. How do you manage unreasonable people? You dismiss them. Like shadows
You must live life in such a spirit that you make in every moment the best of possibilities.
I am this bundle of what has been, and what has been accomplished.
Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often a torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words.
All fanaticism is repressed doubt.
The 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.
Where love stops, power begins, and violence, and terror
I believe that history is capable of anything. There exists no folly that men have not tried out.
Even a lie is a psychic fact.
Every living soul has different talents, different desires, different faculties. Be yourself, for even if you deceive the entire world, you will be ten thousand times worse than nothing.
No psychic value can disappear without being replaced by another of equivalent intensity.
Our heart glows, and secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. Dealing with the unconscious has become a question of life for us.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort.
Everything good is costly, and the development of personality is one of the most costly of all things. It is a matter of saying yes to oneself, of taking oneself as the most serious of tasks, of being conscious of everything one does, and keeping it constantly before one's eyes in all its dubious aspects.
The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things.
Frequently, visualization is the key to lose weight. Imagine yourself with your desired body, and work for it. At some point in the future, this wish will come true.
Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries.
Unfortunately, some parents simply don't love their children. Probably they don't even love themselves. That may be the heart of their problem. Having parents like this is a terrible burden for any child and can shadow him all through life. It can even destroy him.
For better to come, good must stand aside.
There is some place where your specialties can shine. Somewhere that difference can be expressed. It's up to you to find it, and you can.
