Some Carl Jung Quotations

Just as the father represents collective consciousness, the traditional spirit, so the mother stands for the collective unconscious, the source of the water of life. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Page 71.

The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 81.

Life that just happens in and for itself is not real life; it is real only when it is known. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Page 81.

Natural man is not a "self"—he is the mass and a particle in the mass, collective to such a decree that he is not even sure of his own ego. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Page 81.

I conjecture that the treasure is also the "companion," the one who goes through life at our side—in all probability a close analogy to the lonely ego who finds a mate in the self, for at first the self is the strange non-ego. ~CW 12, Page 117.

But no matter how much parents and grandparents may have sinned against the child, the man who is really adult will accept these sins as his own condition which has to be reckoned with. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Page 117.

In the light of the possibilities revealed by intuition, man's earthliness is certainly a lamentable imperfection; but this very imperfection is part of his innate being, of his reality. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Page 114.

Naturally, modern ignorance of and prejudice against intimate psychic experiences dismiss them as psychic anomalies and put them in psychiatric pigeon-holes without making the least attempt to understand them. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Page 547.

If we now recall to what a degree the soul has humanized and realized itself, we can judge how very much it today expresses the body also, with which it is coexistent. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Page 544.

I have been accused of deifying the soul. Not I but God Himself deified it." ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 14.

It is the prime task of all education (of adults) to convey the archetype of the God image, or its emanations and effects, to the conscious mind. ~Carl Jung, MDR, Page 47.

Consciousness is the transformation and the transformer of the primordial instinctual images. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 9.

Consciousness is the divine light; it is the possibility of seeing oneself, and this means to me that it is the very basis of life. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 9.

But a conscious attitude that renounces its ego-bound intentions—not in imagination only, but in truth—and submits to the supra-personal decrees of fate, can claim to be serving a king. This more exalted attitude raises the status of the anima from that of a temptress to a psychopomp. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Page 380.

Since the soul animates the body, just as the soul is animated by the spirit, she tends to favour the body and everything bodily, sensuous, and emotional. She lies caught in "the chains" of Physis, and she desires "beyond physical necessity." She must be called back by the "counsel of the spirit" from her lostness in matter and the world. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Page 472.

We must enter into our mind [mentem], which is the eternal spiritual image of God within us, and this is to enter into the truth of the Lord; we must pass beyond ourselves to the eternal and preeminently spiritual, and to that which is above us . . . this is the threefold illumination of the one day. ~St. Bonaventure; ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Page 505.

It [the unconscious] is and remains beyond the reach of subjective arbitrary control, in a realm where nature and her secrets can be neither improved upon nor perverted, where we can listen but may not meddle. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Page 46.

Therefore my formula: for the love of mankind and for the love of yourself-of mankind in yourself-create a devil. That is an act of devotion, I should say; you have to put something where there is nothing, for the sake of mankind. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1322.

Nature herself is unconscious and the original man is unconscious; his great achievement against nature is that he becomes conscious. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1286.

There is no real life without archetypal experiences. The ordinary life is two-dimensional-it consists of pieces of paper-but the real life consists of three dimensions, and if it doesn't it is not real life, but is a provisional life. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 970.

Zeus was director of Olympus, but he was responsible to the great board of directors of the world, the moira, an invisible influence, the “Faceless Corporation” of Olympus, so even Zeus could not do what he wanted. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 917.

God never was invented, it was always an occurrence, a psychological experience-and mind you, it is still the same experience today. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 916.

We know quite well that no man can ever become the self; the self is an entirely different order of things. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 925.

You see, in the actual functioning of the psyche, it does not matter whether you do a thing or whether it happens to you; whether it reaches you from without or happens within, fate moves through yourself and outside circumstances equally. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 896.

You can never come to your self by building a meditation hut on top of Mount Everest; you will only be visited by your own ghosts and that is not individuation: you are all alone with yourself and the self doesn't exist. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 805.