Plato's world of ideas is beautiful.
The right way to wholeness is made up of fateful detours and wrong turnings.
We don't so much solve our problems as we outgrow them. We add capacities and experiences that eventually make us bigger than the problems.
Nothing is possible without love ... For love puts one in a mood to risk everything.
The world hangs on a thin thread, and that is the psyche of man.
But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yea the very fiend himself— that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved— what then?
Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.
You must go in quest of yourself, and you will find yourself again only in the simple and forgotten things.
The descent into the depths always seems to precede the ascent.
One must be able to let things happen.
The greater the contrast, the greater the potential. Great energy only comes from a correspondingly great tension of opposites.
The self is not only the centre but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of consciousness.
Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.
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.
The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not — which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams.
In each of us there is another whom we do not know.
In sleep, fantasy takes the form of dreams. But in waking life, too, we continue to dream beneath the threshold of consciousness, especially when under the influence of repressed or other unconscious complexes.
Be simple and always take the next step. You needn't see it in advance, but you can look back at it afterwards.There is no 'how' of life, one just does it.
The individual disposition is already a factor in childhood; it is innate, and not acquired in the course of a life.
Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.
Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.
...consciousness can keep only a few images in full clarity at one time, and even this clarity fluctuates.
We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.
Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.
Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.
Modern man is sick because he is not whole.
The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.
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.
From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.
We know that the wildest and most moving dramas are played not in the theatre but in the hearts of ordinary men and women.
Like the sea itself, the unconscious yields an endless and self-replenishing abundance of creatures, a wealth beyond our fathoming.
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.
Everyone is in love with his own ideas
A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. They then dwell in the house next door, and at any moment a flame may dart out and set fire to his own house. Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.
Dreams are the facts from which we must proceed.
Consciousness succumbs all too easily to unconscious influences, and these are often truer and wiser than our conscious thinking.
Therein lies the social significance of art: It is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is more lacking. The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious, which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present. The artist seizes on this image and, in raising it from deepest unconsciousness, he brings it into relation with conscious values, thereby transforming it until it can be accepted by the minds of his contemporaries according to their powers.
Caution has its place, no doubt, but we cannot refuse our support to a serious venture which challenges the whole of the personality. If we oppose it, we are trying to suppress what is best in man - his daring and his aspirations. And should we succeed, we should only have stood in the way of that invaluable experience which might have given a meaning to life.
It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else. Nothing has a more diverse and alienating effect upon society than this moral complacency and lack of responsibility, and nothing promotes understanding and rapprochement more than the mutual withdrawal of projections.
The upheaval of our world and the upheaval of our consciousness are one and the same.
Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.
Error is just as important a condition of life's progress as truth
Archetypes resemble the beds of rivers: dried up because the water has deserted them, though it may return at any time. An archetype is something like an old watercourse along which the water of life flowed for a time, digging a deep channel for itself. The longer it flowed the deeper the channel, and the more likely it is that sooner or later the water will return.
In 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.
No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.
Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality.
The only thing that really matters now is whether man can climb up to a higher moral level, to a higher plane of consciousness, in order to be equal to the superhuman powers which the fallen angels have played into his hands. But he can make no progress until he becomes very much better acquainted with his own nature.
To be normal is the ultimate aim of the unsuccessful.
There is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are older than the historical man, which are inborn in him from the earliest times, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them.
Neurosis is the natural by-product of pain avoidance.
How else could it have occurred to man to divide the cosmos, on the analogy of day and night, summer and winter, into a bright day-world and a dark night-world peopled with fabulous monsters, unless he had the prototype of such a division in himself, in the polarity between the conscious and the invisible and unknowable unconscious?
The fact is that certain ideas exist almost everywhere and at all times and can even spontaneously create themselves quite independently of migration and tradition.
Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them.
Deep down, below the surface of the average man's conscience, he hears a voice whispering, "There is something not right," no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or moral code.
To me dreams are part of nature, which harbors no intention to deceive but expresses something as best it can.
Wo die Liebe herrscht, da gibt es keinen machtwillen, und wo die macht den vorrang hat, da fehlt die Liebe. Das eine ist der Schatten des andern.Translation: Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
Too much of the animal disfigures the civilized human being, too much culture makes a sick animal.
Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
I am the triple owner of the world, the finest Turkey, the Lorelei, Germania and Helvetia of exclusively sweet butter and Naples, and I must supply the whole world with macaroni.
