Carl Jung: Life is never so beautiful as when surrounded by death.

So when you say “Yes” you say at the same time “No.”

This principle may seem a hard one, but as a matter of fact there must be this split in the libido or nothing works and we remain inert.

Life is never so beautiful as when surrounded by death.

Once I had a very wealthy patient who on coming to me said, “I don’t know what you are going to do with me, but I hope you are going to give me something that isn’t grey.”

And that is exactly what life would be if there were no opposites in it; therefore the pairs of opposites are not to be understood as mistakes but as the origin of life.

For the same thing holds in nature.

If there is no difference in high and low, no water can come down.

Modern physics expresses the condition that would ensue were the opposites removed from nature by the term entropy: that is, death in an equable tepidity.

If you have all your wishes fulfilled, you have what could be called psychological entropy.

I found, then, that what I had thought to be a pathological phenomenon is in fact a rule of nature.

We are part of the general energic process, and it is psychology looked at with this fact in mind that I have tried to present in the Types. Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 85