The individual is obliged by the collective demands to purchase his individuation at the cost of an equivalent work for the benefit of society. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 452.
Individuation and collectivity are a pair of opposites, two divergent destinies. They are related to one another by guilt. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 452.
Ideas are not just counters used by the calculating mind; they are also golden vessels full of living feeling. "Freedom" is not a mere abstraction, it is also an emotion. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Pages 310-311.
The unconscious is, as the collective psyche, the psychological representative of society. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 453.
It is normal to think about immortality, and abnormal not to do so or not to bother about it. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 310.
No rules can cope with the paradoxes of life. Moral law, like natural law, represents only one aspect of reality. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 625.
In reply to your kind enquiry about "rules of life," I would like to remark that I have had so much to do with people that I have always endeavored to live by no rules as far as possible. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 625.
The "Invisibles" further assert that our world of consciousness and the "Beyond" together form a single cosmos, with the result that the dead are not in a different place from the living. ~CW 18, Page 315.
The communications of "spirits" are statements about the unconscious psyche, provided that they are really spontaneous and are not cooked up by the conscious mind. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 313.
The Christian-my Christian-knows no curse formulas; indeed he does not even sanction the cursing of the innocent fig-tree by the rabbi Jesus" ~Carl Jung, CW 18, §1468.
Our psychology is a science . . . Plenty of unqualified persons are sure to push their way in and commit the greatest follies . . . Our aim is simply and solely scientific knowledge . . . If religion and morality are blown to pieces in the process, so much the worse for them . . . Knowledge is a force of nature that goes its way irresistibly from inner necessity. ~Carl Jung; CW 18; Page 314.
Nobody is immune to a nationwide evil unless he is unshakably convinced of the danger of his own character being tainted by the same evil. Carl Jung, CW 18, para 1400.
One has to remind oneself again and again that in therapy it is more important for the patient to understand than for the analyst's theoretical expectations to be satisfied. The patient's resistance to the analyst is not necessarily wrong; it is rather a sign that something does not "click." Either the patient is not yet at a point where he would be able to understand, or the interpretation does not fit. ~Carl Jung. CW 18, Page 61
Lack of conscious understanding does not mean that the dream has no effect at all. Even civilized man can occasionally observe that a dream which he cannot remember can slightly alter his mood for better or worse. Dreams can be "understood" to a certain extent in a subliminal way, and that is mostly how they work. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 52.
Dreams are as simple or as complicated as the dreamer is himself, only they are always a little bit ahead of the dreamer's consciousness. I do not understand my own dreams any better than any of you, for they are always somewhat beyond my grasp and I have the same trouble with them as anyone who knows nothing about dream interpretation. Knowledge is no advantage when it is a matter of one's own dreams. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 122
Never apply any theory, but always ask the patient how he feels about his dream images. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 123.
Because the European does not know his own unconscious, he does not understand the East and projects into it everything he fears and despises in himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1253.
[There is a] . . . continued and progressive divine incarnation. Thus man is received and integrated into the divine drama. He seems destined to play a decisive part in it; that is why he must receive the Holy Spirit. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para, 1551.
We cannot receive the Holy Spirit unless we have accepted our own individual life as Christ accepted his. Thus we become the "sons of god" fated to experience the conflict of the divine opposites, represented by the crucifixion. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para, 1551.
Man’s suffering does not derive from his sins but from the maker of his imperfections, the paradoxical God. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1681
I consider my contribution to psychology to be my subjective confession. It is my personal psychology, my prejudice that I see psychological facts as I do. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 275.
Never forget that in psychology the means by which you judge and observe the psyche is the psyche itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 277.
The individual must now consolidate himself by cutting himself off from God and becoming wholly himself Thereby and at the same time he also separates himself from society: Outwardly he plunges into solitude, but inwardly into Hell, distance from God" ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1103.
The serpent in the cave is an image which often occurs in antiquity. It is important to realize that in classical antiquity, as in other civilizations, the serpent not only was an animal that aroused fear and represented danger, but also signified healing. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 116.
Reason becomes unreason when separated from the heart, and a psychic life void of universal ideas sickens from undernourishment. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 311.
The righteous man is the instrument into which God enters in order to attain self-reflection and thus consciousness and rebirth as a divine child trusted to the care of adult man. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 739.
The serpent owes his existence to God and by no means to man. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 690.
Then our era will be a near replica of the first centuries a.d., when Caesar was the State and a god, and divine sacrifices were made to Caesar while the temples of the gods crumbled away. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 581.
Since history repeats itself and the spiral of evolution seemingly returns to the point where it took off, there is a possibility that mankind is approaching an epoch when enough will be said about things which are never what we wish them to be, and when the question will be raised why we were ever interested in a bad comedy. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 581.
Our concept of consciousness supposes thought to be in our most dignified head. But the Pueblo Indians derive consciousness from the intensity of feeling. Abstract thought does not exist for them. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 16.
These "centres" are the so-called chakras? and you not only find them in the teachings of yoga but can discover the same idea in old German alchemical books, which surely do not derive from a knowledge of yoga. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 16.
For modern psychology, ideas are entities, like animals and plants. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 742.
Sooner or later it will be found that nothing really new happens in history. There could be talk of something really novel only if the unimaginable happened : if reason, humanity and love won a lasting victory. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1356.
The essence of culture is continuity and conservation of the past; craving for novelty produces only anti-culture and ends in barbarism. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1344.
Human reality is made up of a thousand vulgarities. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1354.
A life of ease and security has convinced everyone of all the material joys, and has even compelled the spirit to devise new and better ways to material welfare, but it has never produced spirit. Probably only suffering, disillusion, and self-denial do that. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1346.
Most people need someone to confess to otherwise the basis of experience is not sufficiently real. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1811.
"Facts first and theories later is the keynote of Jung's work. He is an empiricist first and last." This view meets with my approval. ~Carl Jung, citing British Medical Journal (9 February 1952), CW 18, Page 664
When a man is in the wilderness, it is the darkness that brings the dreams ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 674
And you can be sure that the dream is your nearest friend; the dream is the friend of those who are not guided any more by the traditional truth and in consequence are isolated. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 674
We must never forget that Christ was an innovator and revolutionary, executed with criminals. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1539
The reformers and great religious geniuses were heretics. It is there that you find the footprints of the Holy Spirit, and no one asks for him or receives him without having to pay a high price. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1539
Why was that cruel immolation of the Son necessary if the anger of the "deus ultionum" is not hard to appease? One doesn't notice much of the Father's goodness and love during the tragic end of his Son. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1539
Suffering that is not understood is hard to bear, while on the other hand it is often astounding to see how much a person can endure when he understands the why and the wherefore. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1578
It is quite understandable that we should seek to hold the truth at arm's length, because it seems impossible to give oneself up to a God who doesn't even respect his own laws when he falls victim to one of his fits of rage or forgets his solemn oath. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1539
We take flight into the Christian collectivity where we can forget even the will of God, for in society we lose the feeling of personal responsibility and can swim with the current. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1539
His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 82
We find numberless images of God, but we cannot produce the original. There is no doubt in my mind that there is an original behind our images, but it is inaccessible. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1589
The important fact about consciousness is that nothing can be conscious without an ego to which it refers. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 18.
There is no reason whatsoever why you should or should not call the beyond-self Christ or Buddha or Purusha or Tao or Khidr or Tifereth. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1672
That gives peace, when people feel that they are living the symbolic life, that they are actors in the divine drama. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 630
A career, producing of children, are all maya compared with that one thing, that your life is meaningful. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 630
My intuition consisted in a sudden and most unexpected insight into the fact that my dream meant myself, my life and my world, my whole reality as against a theoretical structure erected by another, alien mind for reasons and purposes of its own. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 490
An analyst who cannot risk his authority will be sure to lose it. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1172
You can’t wrest people away from their fate, just as in medicine you cannot cure a patient if nature means him to die. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 291
Therefore our Lord himself is a healer; he is a doctor; he heals the sick and he deals with the troubles of the soul; and that is exactly what we call psychotherapy. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 370
The doctor has to cope with actual suffering for better or worse, and ultimately has nothing to rely on except the mystery of divine Providence. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1578
It seems to me to be the Holy Spirit’s task and charge to reconcile and unite the opposites in the human individual through a special development of the human soul. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1553
He who can risk himself wholly to it finds himself directly in the hands of God, and is there confronted with a situation which makes “simple faith” a vital necessity; in other words, the situation becomes so full of risk or overtly dangerous that the deepest instincts are aroused. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1539
The alchemists thought of their opus as a continuation and perfection of creation. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1631
The utterances of the heart— unlike those of the discriminating intellect—always relate to the whole. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1719
The heartstrings sing like an Aeolian harp only under the gentle breath of a mood, an intuition, which does not drown the song but listens. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1719
What the heart hears are the great, all-embracing things of life, the experiences which we do not arrange ourselves but which happen to us. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1719
What sets one man free is another man’s prison. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 163
But when we penetrate the depths of the soul and when we try to understand its mysterious life, we shall discern that death is not a meaningless end, the mere vanishing into nothingness—it is an accomplishment, a ripe fruit on the tree of life. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1705-7
Nor is death an abrupt extinction, but a goal that has been unconsciously lived and worked for during half a lifetime. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1705-7
But if we listen to the quieter voices of our deeper nature we become aware of the fact that soon after the middle of our life the soul begins its secret work, getting ready for the departure. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1705-7
Out of the turmoil and error of our life the one precious flower of the spirit begins to unfold, the four-petaled flower of the immortal light, and even if our mortal consciousness should not be aware of its secret operation, it nevertheless does its secret work of purification. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1705-7
It is my practical experience that psychological understanding immediately revivifies the essential Christian ideas and fills them with the breath of life. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1666
Suffering is not an illness; it is the normal counterpole to happlness. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 179
It is always possible that what lies in the darkness beyond our consciousness is totally different from anything the most daring speculation could imagine. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 617
The very numbers you use in counting are more than you take them for. They are at the same time mythological entities (for the Pythagoreans they were even divine), but you are certainly unaware of this when you use numbers for a practical purpose. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 461
It is the face of our own shadow that glowers at us across the iron curtain. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 85
This general point of view lifts the individual out of himself and connects him with humanity. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 116
If a man is capable of leading a responsible life himself, then he is also conscious of his duties to the community. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 56
Childlike faith, when it comes naturally, is certainly a charisma. But when "joyful faith" and "childlike trust" are instilled by religious education, they are no charisma but a gift of the ambiguous gods, because they can be manipulated only too easily and with greater effect by other "saviours" as well. ~Carl Jung, CW 18
What is the use of technological improvements when mankind must still tremble before those infantile tyrants, ridiculous yet terrible, in the style of Hitler? Figures like these owe their power only to the frightening immaturity of the man of today, and to his barbarous unconsciousness. Truly we can no longer afford to underestimate the importance of the psychic factor in world affairs. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 11
Suffering that is not understood is hard to bear, while on the other hand it is often astounding to see how much a person can endure when he understands the why and the wherefore. A philosophical or religious view of the world enables him to do this, and such views prove to be, at the very least, psychic methods of healing if not of salvation. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 692
The archetypes are the great decisive forces, they bring about the real events, and not our personal reasoning and practical intellect . . . The archetypal images decide the fate of man. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 183
It is a great mistake in practice to treat an archetype as if it were a mere name, word, or concept. It is far more than that it is a piece of life, an image connected with the living individual by the bridge of emotion. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 96
Just as conscious contents can vanish into the unconscious, other contents can also arise from it. Besides a majority of mere recollections, really new thoughts and creative ideas can appear which have never been conscious before. They grow up from the dark depths like a lotus. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 37.
Rationalism and superstition are complementary. It is a psychological rule that the brighter the light, the blacker the shadow; in other words, the more rationalistic we are in our conscious minds, the more alive becomes the spectral world of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 18 Para 10
Nature commits no errors. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 95
The interpretation of dreams enriches consciousness to such an extent that it relearns the forgotten language of the instincts. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 52
Most people need someone to confess to, otherwise the basis of experience is not sufficiently real. They do not "hear" themselves, cannot contrast themselves with something different, and so they have no outside "control." Everything flows inwards and is answered only by oneself, not by another. It makes an enormous difference whether I confess my guilt only to myself or to another person. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 17
There is no admonition to repentance unless the patient does it himself, no penance unless—as is almost the rule he has got himself in a thorough mess, and no absolution unless God has mercy on him. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 17
We cannot demand of our patients a faith which they reject because they do not understand it, or which does not suit them even though we may hold it ourselves. We have to rely on the curative powers inherent in the patient's own nature, regardless of whether the ideas that emerge agree with any known creed or philosophy. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 664
In psychology it is very important that the doctor should not strive to heal at all costs. One has to be exceedingly careful not to impose one's own will and conviction on the patient. You have to give him a certain amount of freedom. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 147
Rightness is not a category that can be applied to religion anyway. Religion consists of psychic realities which one cannot say are right or wrong. Are lice or elephants right or wrong? It is enough that they exist. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Page 327.
…the fact is that free will only exists within the limits of consciousness. Beyond those limits there is mere compulsion. ~Carl Jung; Letters Volume 1, Page 227
You can't wrest people away from their fate, just as in medicine you cannot cure a patient if nature means him to die. Sometimes it is really a question whether you are allowed to rescue a man from the fate he must undergo for the sake of his further development. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 147
What are religions? Religions are psychotherapeutic systems. What are we doing, we psychotherapists? We are trying to heal the suffering of the human mind, of the human psyche or the human soul, and religions deal with the same problem. Therefore our Lord himself is a healer; he is a doctor; he heals the sick and he deals with the troubles of the soul; and that is exactly what we call psychotherapy. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 181
We have stripped all things of their mystery and numinosity: nothing is holy any longer. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 94
Only through our feebleness and incapacity are we linked up with the unconscious, with the lower world of the instincts and with our fellow beings. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 109
Brooding is a sterile activity which runs round in a circle, never reaching a sensible goal. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 16
Contradictory views are necessary for the evolution of any science, only they must not be set up in rigid opposition to each other but should strive for the earliest possible synthesis. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 639
Ultimate truth, if there be such a thing, demands the concert of many voices. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page xiv
The idea of an unconscious psyche has not yet gained undisputed currency, despite the existence of an overwhelming mass of empirical material which proves beyond all doubt that there can be no psychology of consciousness without a recognition of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para ix
Fantasy is not a sickness but a natural and vital activity which helps the seeds of psychic development to grow. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para viii
It makes an enormous difference whether I confess my guilt only to myself or to another person. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 17
He is the man who plants a field and before the crop is ripe is off again to a new field. He has ploughed fields behind him and new hopes ahead all the time, and nothing comes off. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 33.
The people would never have been Deutsch taken in and carried away so completely if this figure had not been a reflected image of the collective hysteria Deutsch. Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1400 .
The immunity of the nation depends entirely upon the existence of a leading minority immune to the evil and capable of combating the powerful suggestive effect. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1400
When you are in the darkness you take the next thing, and that is a dream. And you can be sure that the dream is your nearest friend; the dream is the friend of those who are not guided any more by the traditional truth and in consequence are isolated. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 674.
The serpent in the cave is an image which often occurs in antiquity. It is important to realize that in classical antiquity, as in other civilizations, the serpent not only was an animal that aroused fear and represented danger, but also signified healing. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 116.
The serpent owes his existence to God and by no means to man. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 690.
Since we are psychic beings and not entirely dependent upon space and time, we can easily understand the central importance of the resurrection idea: we are not completely subjected to the powers of annihilation because our psychic totality reaches beyond the barrier of space and time. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1572.
We do not know what an archetype is (i.e., consists of), since the nature of the psyche is inaccessible to us, but we know that archetypes exist and work. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 694.
The better we understand the archetype, the more we participate in its life and the more we realize its eternity or timelessness. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 695.
The utterances of the heart—unlike those of the discriminating intellect—always relate to the whole. The heartstrings sing like an Aeolian harp only to the gentle breath of a premonitory mood, which does not drown the song but listens. What the heart hears are the great things that span our whole lives, the experiences which we do nothing to arrange but which we ourselves suffer. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 9
We have stripped all things of their mystery and numinosity nothing is holy any longer. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 94
To find happiness in the spirit one must be possessed of a "spirit" to find happiness in. A life of ease and security has convinced everyone of all the material joys, and has even compelled the spirit to devise new and better ways to material welfare, but it has never produced spirit. Probably only suffering, disillusion, and self-denial do that. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 6
Because the European does not know his own unconscious, he does not understand the East and projects into it everything he fears and despises in himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 8
Without wishing it, we human beings are placed in situations in which the great "principles" entangle us in something, and God leaves it to us to find a way out. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 869
Besides a majority of mere recollections, really new thoughts and creative ideas can appear which have never been conscious before. They grow up from the dark depths like a lotus. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 37.
Our personal psychology is just a thin skin, a ripple on the ocean of collective psychology. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 183
The archetypes are the great decisive forces, they bring about the real events, and not our personal reasoning and practical intellect . . . The archetypal images decide the fate of man. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 183
Much may be said for Freud's view as a scientific explanation of dream psychology. But I must dispute its completeness, for the psyche cannot be conceived merely in causal terms but requires also a final view. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 473
I am a neutral Swiss and even in my own country I am uninterested in politics, because I am convinced that 99 per cent of politics are mere symptoms and anything but a cure for social evils. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 564.
About 50 per cent of politics is definitely obnoxious inasmuch as it poisons the utterly incompetent mind of the masses. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 564.
The healthy man does not torture others-generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1354.
Whatever we fight about in the outside world is also a battle in our inner selves. For we must finally admit that mankind is not just an accumulation of individuals utterly different from one another, but possesses such a high degree of psychological collectivity that in comparison the individual appears merely as a slight variant. How shall we judge of this matter fairly if we cannot admit that it is also our own problem? Anyone who can admit this will first seek the solution in himself, and this in fact is the way all the great solutions begin. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 313
Modern psychology can affirm that for many people this problem arises in the second half of life, when the unconscious often makes itself felt in a very insistent way. The unconscious is the land of dreams, and according to the primitive view the land of dreams is also the land of the dead and of the ancestors. From all we know about it, the unconscious does in fact seem to be relatively independent of space and time, nor is there anything objectionable in the idea that consciousness is surrounded by the sea of the unconscious, just as this world is contained in “Orthos.” The unconscious is of unknown extent and is possibly of greater importance than consciousness. At any rate, the role which consciousness plays in the life of primitives and primates is insignificant compared with that of the unconscious. The events in our modern world, as we see humanity blindly staggering from one catastrophe to the next, are not calculated to strengthen anyone’s belief in the value of consciousness and the freedom of the will. Consciousness should of course be of supreme importance, for it is the only guarantee of freedom and alone makes it possible for us to avoid disaster. But this, it seems, must remain for the present a pious hope. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 754
At a time when all available energy is spent in the investigation of nature, very little attention is paid to the essence of man, which is his psyche, although many researches are made into its conscious functions. But the really unknown part, which produces symbols, is still virtually unexplored. We receive signals from it every night, yet deciphering these communications seems to be such an odious task that very few people in the whole civilized world can be bothered with it. Man's greatest instrument, his psyche, is little thought of, if not actually mistrusted and despised. "It's only psychological" too often means: it is nothing. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 102
Dogmas are spiritual structures of supreme beauty, and they possess a wonderful meaning which I have sought to fathom in my fashion. Compared with them our scientific endeavours to devise models of the objective psyche are unsightly in the extreme. They are bound to earth and reality, full of contradictions, logically and aesthetically unsatisfying. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 663
The activity of the collective unconscious manifests itself not only in compensatory effects in the lives of individuals, but also in the mutation of dominant ideas in the course of the centuries. This can be seen most clearly in religion, and, to a lesser extent, in the various philosophical, social, and political ideologies. It appears in most dangerous form in the sudden rise and spread of psychic epidemics, as for instance in the witch hunts in Germany at the end of the fourteenth century, or in the social and political utopias of the twentieth century. How far the collective unconscious may be considered the efficient cause of such movements, or merely their material cause, is a question for ethnologists and psychologists to decide; but certain experiences in the field of individual psychology indicate the possibility of a spontaneous activity of archetypes. These experiences usually concern individuals in the second half of life, when it not infrequently happens that drastic changes of outlook are thrust upon them by the unconscious as a result of some defect in their conscious attitude. While the activity of the personal unconscious is confined to compensatory changes in the personal sphere, the changes effected by the collective unconscious have a collective aspect: they alter our view of the world, and, like a contagion, infect our fellow men. (Hence the astonishing effects of certain psychopaths on society!) ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1161
The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals .In our most private and most subjective lives, we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1400.
One's contemporaries are always dense and never understand that what appears to them unseemly ebullience comes less from personal temperament than from the still unknown wellsprings of a new age. How people looked askance at Nietzsche's volcanic emotion, and how long he will be spoken of in times to come! Even Paracelsus has now been gratefully disinterred after four hundred years in an attempt to resuscitate him in modern dress. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 4
We must be able to let things happen in the psyche. For us, this is an art of which most people know nothing. Consciousness is forever interfering, helping, correcting, and negating, never leaving the psychic processes to grow in peace. It would be simple enough, if only simplicity were not the most difficult of all things. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 20
The fundamental error persists in the public that there are definite answers, "solutions," or views which need only be uttered in order to spread the necessary light. But the most beautiful truth—as history has shown a thousand times over—is no use at all unless it has become the innermost experience and possession of the individual. Every unequivocal, so-called "clear" answer always remains stuck in the head, but only very rarely does it penetrate to the heart. The needful thing is not to know the truth but to experience it. Not to have an intellectual conception of things, but to find our way to the inner, and perhaps wordless, irrational experience—that is the great problem. Nothing is more fruitless than talking of how things must or should be, and nothing is more important than finding the way to these far-off goals. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 7
If you take a typical intellectual who is terribly afraid of falling in love, you will think his fear very foolish. But he is most probably right, because he will very likely make foolish nonsense when he falls in love. He will be caught most certainly, because his feeling only reacts to an archaic or to a dangerous type of woman. This is why many intellectuals are inclined to marry beneath them. They are caught by the landlady perhaps, or by the cook, because they are unaware of their archaic feeling through which they get caught. But they are right to be afraid, because their undoing will be in their feeling. Nobody can attack them in their intellect. There they are strong and can stand alone, but in their feelings they can be influenced, they can be caught, they can be cheated, and they know it. Therefore never force a man into his feeling when he is an intellectual. He controls it with an iron hand because it is very dangerous. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 20
Although we are still far from having overcome our primitive mentality, which enjoys its most signal triumphs just in the sphere of sex where man is made most vividly aware of his mammalian nature, certain ethical refinements have nevertheless crept in which permit anyone with ten to fifteen centuries of Christian education behind him to progress towards a slightly higher level. On this level the spirit—from the biological an incomprehensible psychic phenomenon—plays a not unimportant role psychologically. It had a weighty word to say on the subject of Christian marriage and it still participates vigorously in the discussion whenever marriage is doubted and depreciated. It appears in a negative capacity as counsel for the instincts, and in a positive one as the defender of human dignity. Small wonder, then, that a wild and confusing conflict breaks out between man as an instinctual creature of nature and man as a spiritual and cultural being. The worst thing about it is that the one is forever trying violently to suppress the other in order to bring about a so-called harmonious solution of the conflict. Unfortunately, too many people still believe in this procedure, which is all-powerful in politics; there are only a few here and there who condemn it as barbaric and would like to set up in its place a just compromise whereby each side of man's nature is given a hearing. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para xii
Why is it that we are especially interested in psychology just now? The answer is that everyone is in desperate need of it. Humanity seems to have reached a point where the concepts of the past are no longer adequate, and we begin to realize that our nearest and dearest are actually strangers to us, whose language we no longer understand. It is beginning to dawn on us that the people living on the other side of the mountain are not made up exclusively of red-headed devils who are responsible for all the evil on this side of the mountain. A little of this uneasy suspicion has filtered through into the relations between the sexes; not everyone is utterly convinced that everything good is in "me" and everything evil in "you." Already we can find super-moderns who ask themselves in all seriousness whether there may not be something wrong with us, whether perhaps we are too unconscious, too antiquated, and whether this may not be the reason why when confronted with difficulties in sexual relationships we still continue to employ with disastrous results the methods of the Middle Ages if not those of the caveman. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para xi
Our personal psychology is just a thin skin, a ripple on the ocean of collective psychology. The powerful factor, the factor which changes our whole life, which changes the surface of our known world, which makes history, is collective psychology, and collective psychology moves according to laws entirely different from those of our consciousness. The archetypes are the great decisive forces, they bring about the real events, and not our personal reasoning and practical intellect . . . The archetypal images decide the fate of man. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 183
I make a general distinction between "religion" and a "creed" for the sake of the layman, since it is chiefly he who reads my books and not the academic scholar. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1637
