Carl Jung on "Thinking" - Anthology

[Carl Jung on “Thinking” – Anthology]

Thinking is based on reality only indirectly, but nonetheless it can carry just as much conviction. Nothing is more real than an idea to a person who thinks. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 132

Thinking, then, derives from the reality of the image, but has the image reality? To answer that question, let us turn to the field of natural science, where we can find abundant evidence of the potency of an image. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 132

The great philosophers have spoken of them always as being eternal. It is these static images that underlie thinking. We could call them, if we chose, Logos. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 133

If you go to thinking, take your heart with you. If you go to love, take your head with you. Love is empty without thinking, thinking hollow without love. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 253.

If forethinking and pleasure unite in me, a third arises from them, the divine son, who is the supreme meaning, the symbol, the passing over into a new creation. I do not myself become the supreme meaning or the symbol, but the symbol becomes in me such that it has its substance, and I mine. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 249.

A thinker should fear Salome, since she wants his head, especially if he is a holy man. A thinker cannot be a holy person, otherwise he loses his head. It does not help to hide oneself in thought. There the solidification overtakes you. You must turn back to motherly forethought to obtain renewal. But forethought leads to Salome. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 248.

The serpent is the earthly essence of man of which he is not conscious. Its character changes according to peoples and lands, since it is the mystery that flows to him from the nourishing earth-mother. The earthly (numen loci) separates forethinking and pleasure in man, but not in itself. The serpent has the weight of the earth in itself but also its changeability and germination from which everything that becomes emerges. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 247.

When you say that the place of the soul is not, then it is not. But if you say that it is, then it is. Notice what the ancients said in images the word is a creative act. The ancients said: in the beginning was the Word. Consider this and think upon it. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 236.

Some have their reason in thinking, others in feeling. Both are servants of Logos, and in secret become worshipers of the serpent. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 280.

My soul: "Who gives you thoughts and words? Do you make them? Are you not my serf a recipient who lies at my door and picks up my alms? And you dare think that what you devise and speak could be nonsense? Don't you know yet that it comes from me and belongs to me?" ~Carl Jung, Red Book, Page 241.

What a thinker does not think he believes does not exist, and what one who feels does not feel he believes does not exist. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 248.

He [Jung] showed a diagram of a cross with Rational/Thinking (Elijah) at the top, Feeling (Salome) at the bottom, Irrational / Intuition (Superior) at the left, and Sensation / Inferior (Serpent) at the right. ~The Red Book, Page 247, Footnote 173.

Notice what the ancients said in images: the word is a creative act. The ancients said: in the beginning was the Word. Consider this and think upon it. The words that oscillate between nonsense and supreme meaning are the oldest and truest. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 236.

The images of the "Mystery play," on the other hand, personify principles accessible to thinking and intellectual understanding, and their allegorical manner accordingly also invites such an attempt at explanation. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 365.

Desire without forethinking gains much but keeps nothing; therefore his desire is the source of constant disappointment. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 249, Footnote 190.

If pleasure is united with forethinking, the serpent lies before them. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 249, Footnote 190.

What do you think of the essence of Hell? Hell is when the depths come to you with all that you no longer are or are not yet capable of. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.

When you step into your own Hell, never think that you come like one suffering in beauty; or as a proud pariah, but you come like a stupid and curious fool and gaze in wonder at the scraps that have fallen from your table. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 262.

I think of Christianity in the desert. Physically, those ancients went into the desert. Did they also enter into the desert of their own self? Or was their self not as barren and desolate as mine? There they wrestled with the devil. I wrestle with waiting. It seems to me not less since it is truly a hot hell ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Footnote 74, Page 236.

It is strange that Salome's garden lies so close to the dignified and mysterious hall of ideas. Does a thinker therefore experience awe or perhaps even fear of the idea, because of its proximity to paradise? ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 249, Draft, Footnote 178.

I: "But don't you think that Christianity could ultimately be a transformation of your Egyptian teachings?"

Anchorite: "If you say that our old teachings were less adequate expressions of Christianity, then I'm more likely to agree with you." ~Carl Jung and the Anchorite, Liber Novus, Page 272.

Judge not! Think of the blond savage of the German forests, who had to betray the hammer-brandishing thunder to the pale Near-Eastern God who was nailed to the wood like a chicken marten. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 242.

Thoughts grow in me like a forest, populated by many different animals. But man is domineering in his thinking, and therefore he kills the pleasure of the forest and that of the wild animals. Man is violent in his desire, and he himself becomes a forest and a forest animal. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 250.

He who breaks the wall of words overthrows Gods and defiles temples. The solitary is a murderer. He murders the people, because he thus thinks and thereby breaks down ancient sacred walls. He calls up the daimons of the boundless. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 270.

Some have their reason in thinking, others in feeling. Both are servants of Logos, and in secret become worshipers of the serpent. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 280.

There is no escape. So it is that you come to know what a real God is. Now you’ll think up clever truisms, preventive measures, secret escape routes, excuses, potions capable of inducing forgetfulness, but it’s all useless. The fire burns right through you. That which guides forces you onto the way. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 291.

The place where Elijah and Salome live together is a dark space and a bright one. The dark space is the space of forethinking. It is dark so he who lives there requires vision. ~Carl Jung and Elijah, Liber Novus, Page 247.

A thinker who descends in to his fore thinking finds his next step leading into the garden of Salome. Therefore the thinker fears his forethought, although he lives on the foundation of fore thinking. The visible surface is safer than the underground. Thinking protects against the way of error, and therefore it leads to petrification. ~Carl Jung and Elijah, Liber Novus, Page 248.

A thinker should fear Salome, since she wants his head, especially if he is a holy man. A thinker cannot be a holy person, otherwise he loses his head. It does not help to hide oneself in thought. There the solidification overtakes you. You must turn back to motherly forethought to obtain renewal. But forethought leads to Salome. ~Carl Jung and Elijah, Liber Novus, Page 248.

Because I was a thinker and caught sight of the hostile principle of pleasure from forethinking, it appeared to me as Salome. If I had been one who felt, and had groped my way toward forethinking, then it would have appeared to me as a serpent-encoiled daimon, if I had actually seen it. ~Carl Jung and Elijah, Liber Novus, Page 248.

In the garden it had to become apparent to me that I loved Salome. This recognition struck me, since I had not thought it. What a thinker does not think he believes does not exist, and what one who feels does not feel he believes does not exist. You begin to have a presentiment of the whole when you embrace your opposite principle, since the whole belongs to both principles, which grow from one root. ~Carl Jung and Elijah, Liber Novus, Page 248.

Think diligently about the images that the ancients have left behind. They show the way of what is to come. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 236.

The outer opposition is an image of my inner opposition. Once I realize this, I remain silent and think of the chasm of antagonism in my soul. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 279.

Did you ever think of the evil in you? ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 274.

Whoever is in love is a full and overflowing vessel, and awaits the giving. Whoever is in fore thinking is deep and hollow and awaits fulfillment. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 253.

The spirit of this time would like to hear of use and value. I also thought this way, and my humanity still thinks this way. But that other spirit forces me nevertheless to speak, beyond justification, use, and meaning. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 229

I most certainly was characterized by thinking … and I had a great deal of Intuition, too. And I had a definite difficulty with Feeling. And my relation to reality was not particularly brilliant. … I was often at variance with the reality of things. Now that gives you all the necessary data for diagnosis. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung, Speaking, Pages 435-6.

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.

The animus is the masculine thinking in a woman. ~ Carl Jung, CW 13, Page 267.

For life comes to a man through the anima, in spite of the fact that he thinks it comes to him through the mind. He masters life through the mind but life lives in him through the anima. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1105.

And this is also the reason why the psyche is forgotten so often and so long, and why the intellect makes such frequent use of magical, apotropaic words like "occult" and "mystic," in the hope that even intelligent people will think these mutterings really mean something. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para119

Do we delude ourselves in thinking that we possess and control our own psyches, and is what science calls the "psyche" not just a question-mark arbitrarily confined within the skull, but rather a door that opens upon the human world from a world beyond, allowing unknown and mysterious powers to act upon man and carry him on the wings of the night to a more than personal destiny. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 148

When I enter the sphere of physical or mathematical thinking sensu strictiori, I lose all understanding of what the term synchronicity means; I feel as though I am groping my way through dense fog. ~Carl Jung, Atom and Archetype, Page 68.

What made the deepest impression upon me was the central role played in your [Jung’s] thinking by the concept of "incarnation" as a scientific working hypothesis. ~Wolfgang Pauli, Atom and Archetype, Pages 81-83

A million zeroes joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but the fatally shortsighted habit of our age is to think only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hands of a single madman. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Page 39.

Our unconscious is surely located in the body, and you mustn't think this a contradiction to the statement I usually make, that the collective unconscious is everywhere; for if you could put yourself into your sympathetic system, you would know what sympathy is-you would understand why the nervous system is called sympathetic. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 749-751.

The Animals. We appreciate them much more. We think of the psychology of animals. In the 19th century they made laws for their protection, and began to treat them more decently, but it is only in recent years that we begin to think of a few animals as our brothers. ~Carl Jung, Cornwall Seminar, Page 21.

Abstraction is an activity pertaining to the psychological functions in general. There is an abstract thinking, just as there is abstract feeling, sensation, and intuition. Abstract thinking singles out the rational, logical qualities of a given content from its intellectually irrelevant components. Abstract feeling does the same with a content characterized by its feeling-values . . . . Abstract sensation would be aesthetic as opposed to sensuous sensation, and abstract intuition would be symbolic as opposed to fantastic intuition. ~Carl Jung; CW 6, par. 678.

Others restrict spirit to certain psychic capacities or functions or qualities, such as the capacity to think and reason in contradistinction to the more “soulful” sentiments. Here spirit means the sum-total of all the phenomena of rational thought, or of the intellect, including the will, memory, imagination, creative power, and aspirations motivated by ideals. ~ Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 386.

Psychological truths are not metaphysical insights; they are habitual modes of thinking, feeling, and behaving that experience has proved appropriate and useful. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, para 50.

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. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 33.

It should be someone already has a much clouded vision or view of a very hazy distance, the human society, if he thinks that by uniform regulation of life an equal distribution of happiness could be achieved. ~Carl Jung; CW 6.

The danger that faces us today is that the whole of reality will be replaced by words. This accounts for that terrible lack of instinct in modern man, particularly the city-dweller. He lacks all contact with life and the breath of nature. He knows a rabbit or a cow only from the illustrated paper, the dictionary, or the movies, and thinks he knows what it is really like-and is then amazed that cowsheds "smell," because the dictionary didn't say so. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 882.

Of course, thinks every time, all previous times had been biased, and now we think it more than ever, and has therefore just as wrong as all the previous times, thought so. How often have you experienced it, that the truth has been condemned? It's sad but unfortunately true, that man learns nothing from history. This fact will cause us the most trouble, because when we are about in such dark somehow enlightened one thing to collect empirical data, we will find it quite sure where all the authorities have assured us that nothing could be found. ~Carl Jung; Synchronicity acausality and occultism, dtv Verlag, Munich, 1990.

It seems to be very hard for people to live with riddles or to let them live, although one would think that life is so full of riddles as it is that a few more things we cannot answer would make no difference. But perhaps it is just this that is so unendurable, that there are irrational things in our own psyche which upset the conscious mind in its illusory certainties by confronting it with the riddle of its existence. ~Carl Jung;, CW 13, Page 307.

We have, therefore, two kinds of thinking: directed thinking, and dreaming or fantasy-thinking. The former operates with speech elements for the purpose of communication, and is difficult and exhausting; the latter is effortless, working as it were spontaneously, with the contents ready to hand, and guided by unconscious motives. The one produces innovations and adaptation, copies reality, and tries to act upon it; the other turns away from reality, sets free subjective tendencies, and, as regards adaptation, is unproductive ~Carl Jung, CW 5, para. 20.

It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are themselves. Thinking is an act of the soul whereby it becomes conscious of itself and of other things outside itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Footnote 2.

Many people mistakenly overestimate the role of will power and think that nothing can happen to their minds that they do not decide and intend. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols, Page 22

Nothing is so apt to challenge our self-awareness and alertness as being at war with oneself. One can hardly think of any other or more effective means of waking humanity out of the irresponsible and innocent half-sleep of the primitive mentality and bringing it to a state of conscious responsibility. ~Carl Jung; CW 6; Page 964.

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 4.

Nowhere are we closer to the sublime secret of all origination than in the recognition of our own selves, whom we always think we know already. Yet we know the immensities of space better than we know our own depths, where -even though we do not understand it-we can listen directly to the throb of creation itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 737

After the disgraceful defection of Adler, a gifted thinker but a malicious paranoiac, I am now in trouble with our friend, Jung, who apparently has not outgrown his own neurosis.” ~Sigmund Freud to James Jackson Putnam, 20Aug1912.

If Jung were to obtain the professorship without the administrative duties, it would of course be a huge gain for us, but I think that he himself regards it as improbable. ~Sigmund Freud to Oskar Pfister, Feb 5, 1912.

What happens when man introjects God? A superman psychosis, because every blockhead thinks that when he withdraws a projection its contents cease to exist. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 407.

The mistake, it seems to me, is that these critics actually believe only in words, without knowing it, and then think they have posited God. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 486-489.

I think that if you immerse yourself in my thought-processes without regarding them as a new gospel, a light will gradually go up for you about the nature of psychotherapy. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 455-456.

People like you must look at everything and think about it and communicate with the heaven that dwells deep within them and listen inwardly for a word to come. At the same time organize your outward life properly so that your voice carries weight. ~Carl Jung to Walter Corti, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 69-70.

This is because dependence on the behaviour of others is a last vestige of childhood which we think we can't do without. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 78.

I don't know T. S. Eliot. If you think that his book is worthwhile, then I don't mind even poetry. I am only prejudiced against all forms of modern art. It is mostly morbid and evil on top [of that]. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 468-469.

Philosophical criticism must, to my way of thinking, start with a maximum of factual knowledge if it is not to remain hanging in midair and thus be condemned to sterility. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 330-332.

Behind Gretchen stands the Gnostic sequence: Helen-Mary-Sophia. They represent a real Platonic world of ideas (thinking and sensation on the mystic level). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 264-266.

You see, in spite of being a man in advanced age, you still have a young soul, a lovely anima, and she is confronted with the dangerous lizard. In other words, your soul is threatened by' chthonic poison. Now this is exactly the situation of our Western mind. We think we can deal with such problems in an almost rationalistic way, by conscious attempts and efforts, imitating Yoga methods and such dangerous stuff, but we forget entirely that first of all we should establish a connection between the higher and the lower regions of our psyche ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 95-97.

Wisdom is never violent: where wisdom reigns there is no conflict between thinking and feeling. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 334.

We think we can deal with such problems in an almost rationalistic way, by conscious attempts and efforts, imitating Yoga methods and such dangerous stuff, but we forget entirely that first of all we should establish a connection between the higher and the lower regions of our psyche. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 95-97.

You know, Eastern Yoga is based upon man as he really is, but we have a conscious imagination about ourselves and think this is our Self, which is an appalling mistake. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 95-97.

Old age is only half as funny as one is inclined to think. It is at all events the gradual breaking down of the bodily machine, with which foolishness identifies as ourselves. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 2, Page 580.

But besides that 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, and, 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. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Pages 399-403.

The combination of priest and medicine man is not so impossible as you seem to think. They are based upon a common archetype, which will assert its right provided your inner development will continue as hitherto. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 516-517.

I think we must give it time to infiltrate into people from many centers, to revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol and myth, ever so gently to transform Christ back into the soothsaying god of the vine, which he was, and in this way absorb those ecstatic instinctual forces of Christianity for the one purpose of making the cult and the sacred myth what they once were a drunken feast of joy where man regained the ethos and holiness of an animal. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 17-19.

We think: "How peculiar that person is", but no one is peculiar really. People seem odd to us when they possess qualities which we do not see in ourselves. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 198.

We think of a chaos as complete confusion, but to the alchemists it was a confusion of definite qualities and of special factors. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Pages 201-202.

In this respect our time is caught in a fatal error: we believe we can criticize religious facts intellectually; we think, for instance, like Laplace, that God is a hypothesis which can be subjected to intellectual treatment, to affirmation or denial. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 110.

Adler's letter is stupid chatter and can safely be ignored. We aren't children here. If Adler ever says anything sensible or worth listening to I shall take note of it, even though I don't think much of him as a person. ~Carl Jung, Freud/Jung Letters, Page 532.

We think of maya as illusion, deception, but it is also building material, illusion which becomes real. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 116.

We do not stop to think that nothing would exist, there would be no culture in the world, if it were not for active imagination; it is always the forerunner, everything springs from it. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Pages 175.

We like to think that we are not unconscious but we are to an amazing extent: think of the many things we do without knowing it. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Page 111.

The alchemists think of the Redeemer as lying hidden or sleeping in the materia, he does not only descend from heaven but comes also from the depths of matter. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 189.

We think we have conjured away this danger when we call it God, for Christianity has forgotten the dark side of God. The old Church knew that God was dangerous. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 215.

That is, as man himself is created for a purpose, he may use all created things for that purpose, and in order to do so freely he must be indifferent and unconcerned about them. One might almost think that this attitude was similar to that of Buddhism. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IX, Page 220.

We meet with the possibility of a very dangerous misunderstanding here, because if we call becoming conscious becoming spirit, we think that consciousness is spirit and thus mix up the intellect and the spirit. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IX, Page 221.

Indians think of thought as something thinly substantial, thought is not vaporous to them, as it is to us. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 11Nov1938, Page 25.

But the East thinks in circles, and then 5 is not just the next figure but the centre, it is the quinta essentia, the essence of all. We used to think like this in the Middle Ages also, but scientific thinking put a stop to it. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 13Jan1939, Page 54.

The eastern gods all have two aspects, Kwannon, the well-known goddess of kindness, is also the goddess of hell. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 13Jan1939, Page 57.
Rupa-skandha = Thinking.
Vedana-skandha = Sensation.
Samjna-skandha = Feeling.
Sangskara-skandha = Intuition.
Vijniina-skandha = Buddha Vajra-sattva . Knowledge. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 13Jan1939, Page 52.

I do not know why India was not able to keep Buddhism, but I think probably its present polytheistic religion is a better expression of the Indian soul today than the one perfect Buddha. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 27Jan1939, Pages 69.

We can understand thinking, feeling and sensation but intuition is another thing. We do not know how we arrive at an intuition, it is perception by way of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3Mar1939, Page 99.

We are not used to thinking that light comes from within as well as from without, it is as if the eye had an inward light of its own, if we receive a blow on the head for instance, we see stars. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture III, 17May 1935, Pages 210.

The twenty gods have no special importance in the East, Eastern man has no liking for being born a god, for the gods have to become men and this they think would only make the process last longer. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture III, 17May 1935, Pages 210.

So we cannot judge dreams from the conscious point of view, but can only think of them as complementary to consciousness. Dreams answer the questions of our conscious. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V 23Nov1934 Page 157.

We are not far from the truth, in fact we are very near to primeval truth, when we think of our dreams as answers to questions, which we have asked and which we have not asked. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V 23Nov1934 Page 157.

Then there are philosophical dreams which think for us and in which we get the thoughts that we should have had during the day. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI 5July1934, Page 135.

It is fairly easy to imagine being able to think consciously, to have one's thoughts under control, but when it comes to feeling it is much more difficult to do so, especially for a man. ~Carl Jung, Lecture IV, 18May1934, Page 102.

As a matter of fact it is by no means everyone who can sit down and think out something voluntarily, and it is quite equally possible for someone to sit down and feel something out. It just depends which is your domesticated function. ~Carl Jung, Lecture IV, 18May1934, Page 102.

Schopenhauer was primarily a thinker and secondarily an intuitive, whereas the quantities were reversed in Nietzsche. ~Carl Jung, Lecture IV, 18May1934, Page 105.

We make the great mistake of thinking that children are born a tabula rasa, but this is not the case. They are born with a vast inherited memory which contains a subjective content to meet everything which they contact externally. ~Carl Jung, Lecture V 25May1934, Page 108.

There is unchanging opposition, war in fact, between thinking and feeling. If thinking appears cold to feeling, feeling certainly appears stupid to thinking. ~Carl Jung, Lecture III, 4May1934, Page 100.

You can quite well say “I think”, “I feel” but the other view works also, “I am thought”, “I am felt“. ~Carl Jung, Lecture III, 4May1934, Page 101.

If the light were suddenly to go out and you could no longer see me, you would not be likely to think that I had ceased to exist, yet it would be no more foolish than to assume that the contents of the psychic background only exist when we can see them. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IX,15Dec1933, Page 41.

Apotropaic: Descriptive of "magical thinking," based on the desire to depotentiate the influence of an object or person. Apotropaic actions are characteristic of introversion as a mode of psychological orientation. I have seen an introverted child who made his first attempts to walk only after he had learned the names of all the objects in the room he might touch. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, par. 897.

Everyone whose attitude is introverted thinks, feels, and acts in a way that clearly demonstrates that the subject is the prime motivating factor and that the object is of secondary importance. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Par 769.

Even among professing Christians there are very few who think seriously about the Trinity as a matter of dogma and would consider it a possible subject for reflection—not to mention the educated public. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 112.

It was Einstein who first started me off thinking about a possible relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages108-109.

The latest developments of scientific thinking, especially in physics, but recently also in psychology, make it clear that "freedom" is a necessary correlate to the purely statistical nature of the concept of causality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 182-183.

Presumably you are thinking of my psychology which, though born of the Christian spirit, seeks to give adequate answers to the spirit of this age: the voice of a doctor struggling to heal the psychic confusion of his time and thus compelled to use a language very different from yours. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 225-226.

I find that all my thoughts circle round God like the planets round the sun, and are as irresistibly attracted by him. I would feel it the most heinous sin were I to offer any resistance to this compelling force. I feel it is God's will that I should exercise the gift of thinking that has been vouchsafed me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 235-238.

It seems to me one more proof of the overweening gnostic tendency in philosophical thinking to ascribe to God qualities which are the product of our own anthropomorphic formulations. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 254-256.

Tantra Yoga gives the classic localizations of thought: anahata, thinking (or localization of consciousness) in the chest region (phrenes); visuddha (localized in the larynx), verbal thinking; and ajna, vision, symbolized by an eye in the forehead, which is attained only when verbal image and object are no longer identical, i.e., when their participation mystique is abolished. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.

His "psychological" style is definitely schizophrenic, with the difference, however, that the ordinary patient cannot help talking and thinking in such a way, while [James] Joyce willed it and moreover developed it with all his creative forces. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 266.

In these terrible days when evil is once again inundating the world in every conceivable form, I want you to know that I am thinking of you and of your family in Hungary, and hope with you that the avenging angel will pass by their door. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 336.

Since my language is a reflection of my thinking and feeling, I cannot, when faced with a wider public, express myself otherwise than as I am, and I am anything but uncomplicated. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 357-358.

What you think of as a few days of spiritual communion would be unendurable for me with anyone, even my closest friends. The rest is silence! This realization becomes clearer every day as the need to communicate dwindles. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 363.

The animus is obstinate, harping on principles, laying down the law, dogmatic, world-reforming, theoretic, word-mongering, argumentative, and domineering. Both alike have bad taste: the anima surrounds herself with inferior people, and the animus lets himself be taken in by second-rate thinking. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 222f.

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. ~C.G. Jung Speaking, Pages 438-439.

It is to be conjectured that just as the chicken comes out of the egg in the same way all the world over, so there are psychic modes of functioning, certain ways of thinking, feeling, and imagining, which can be found everywhere and at all times, quite independent of tradition. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 206.

Behind Gretchen stands the Gnostic sequence: Helen-Mary-Sophia. They represent a real Platonic world of ideas (thinking and sensation on the mystic level ). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 265.

If pleasure is united with forethinking, the serpent lies before them. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 249, Footnote 190.

Some have their reason in thinking, others in feeling. Both are servants of Logos, and in secret become worshipers of the serpent. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 280.

Because I was a thinker and caught sight of the hostile principle of pleasure from forethinking, it appeared to me as Salome. If I had been one who felt, and had groped my way toward forethinking, then it would have appeared to me as a serpent-encoiled daimon, if I had actually seen it. ~Carl Jung and Elijah, Liber Novus, Page 248.

Too much secrecy causes neurosis and a split from reality, but having no mystery permits only collective thinking and Action. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 14.

On the other hand one might ask the question whether we can as hitherto go on thinking in terms of space and time, while modern physics begins to relinquish these terms in favour of a time-space continuum, in which space is no more space and time no more time. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.

But if we think that God were responsible for the original sin, there would be no more mystery about sin. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 48.

I should like to study the theory of numbers. What is a number, an entity, a sequence, an archetype? We think we can perceive and grasp a number logically and suddenly it behaves quite differently from the way we expected. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 55.

Oh my, yes! Mind you, every patient you have gets interested in psychology. Nearly everyone thinks he is meant to be an analyst, inevitably. ~Carl Jung, Conversations Evans, Page 11.

I think, you see, that when Freud says that one of the first interests, and the foremost interest is to feed, he doesn't need such a peculiar kind of terminology like "oral zone." Of course, they put it into the mouth— ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 13.

We think that we are born today tabula rasa without a history, but man has always lived in the myth. To think that man is born without a history within himself— that is a disease. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 36.

One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, para 221.

If one views modern art prospectively, as I think one can, it plainly announces the uprush of the dissolvent forces of disorder. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 82.

I'm no artist. I only try to get things into stone of which I think it is important that they appear in hard matter and stay on for a reasonably long time. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 83.

I am not engaged in philosophy, but merely in thinking within the framework of the special task that is laid upon me: to be a proper psychiatrist, a healer of the soul. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 69-71

The main difficulty with synchronicity (and also with ESP) is that one thinks of it as being produced by the subject, while I think it is rather in the nature of objective events. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 181.

Well, you see, the [psychological] type is nothing static. It changes in the course of life... Carl Jung, C.G. Jung, Speaking, Page 435.

But I wonder how it comes that so many people think I am a gnostic while equally many others accuse me of being an agnostic. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 53-55.

You overlook the facts and then think that the name is the fact, and thus you reach the nonsensical conclusion that I hypostatize ideas and am therefore a "Gnostic." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 245.

I do not think that so-called personal messages from the dead can be dismissed in globo as self-deceptions. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 333-334.

I don't think that all reports of so-called miraculous phenomena (such as precognition, telepathy, supranormal knowledge, etc.) are doubtful. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 333-334.

I naturally agree with what you say about freedom of thought. The Communist doesn't come into this category, since he doesn't think; but his actions are a danger to the public. If he thought, he would have found out his deceit long ago. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 179-180

L. Frobenius: an imaginative and somewhat credulous original. Great collector of material. Less good as a thinker. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 4-5.
God: an inner experience, not discussable as such but impressive. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 4-5.

I think it [UFO’s] is chiefly an obstinate rumour, but the question whether there is something real behind it is not answered. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 5-6.

On the other hand one might ask the question whether we can as hitherto go on thinking in terms of space and time, while modern physics begins to relinquish these terms in favour of a time-space continuum, in which space is no more space and time no more time. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.

I am not engaged in philosophy, but merely in thinking within the framework of the special task that is laid upon me: to be a proper psychiatrist, a healer of the soul. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 69-71

X. is certainly all wet when he thinks that the Jewish Gnosis contains nothing of the Christian mystery. It contains practically the whole of it, but in its unrevealed pleromatic state. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 91-93.

Concerning Mr. Buber, I can tell you that to my knowledge there has never been the slightest personal friction between us and I do not think that Buber has ever been impolite to me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 101-102.

It was above all the simplicity and directness of his[Einstein] genius as a thinker that impressed me mightily and exerted a lasting influence on my own intellectual work. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages108-109.

It was Einstein who first started me off thinking about a possible relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages108-109.

With Einstein's departure from Zurich my relation with him ceased, and I hardly think he has any recollection of me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages108-109.

…I had to think of the question recently raised by a mathematician, as to whether it was possible to produce absolute chance groupings. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 122-123.

I think the attempt to link up ESP with any personalistic psychology is absolutely hopeless. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 126-127.

Anybody going ahead is alone or thinks he is lonely at times, no matter whether he is in the church or in the world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 133-138

I scarcely think that the Jews have to accept the Christ symbol. They need only understand its meaning. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 154-155.

The latest developments of scientific thinking, especially in physics, but recently also in psychology, make it clear that "freedom" is a necessary correlate to the purely statistical nature of the concept of causality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 182-183.

Concerning the omniscience it is important to know that Adam already was equipped with supernatural knowledge according to Jewish and Christian tradition, all the more so Christ. I think that the great split in those days was by no means a mistake but a very important collective fact of synchronistic correspondence with the then new aeon of Pisces. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 163-174

The introverted thinker is very much in need of a developed feeling, i .e., of a less autoerotic, sentimental, melodramatic and emotional relatedness to people and things. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 163-174

We think it is enough to discover new things, but we don't realize that knowing more demands a corresponding development of morality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 163-174

Even if the ego should be (as I think) the supreme point of the self, a mountain infinitely higher than Mt. Everest, It would be nothing but a little grain of rock or ice, never the whole mountain. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 194-196

Back in the 1930s, Carl Jung, the eminent thinker and psychologist, put it this way: Criticism has 'the power to do good when there is something that must be destroyed, dissolved or reduced, but [it is] capable only of harm when there is something to be built. ― Donald O. Clifton, Now, Discover Your Strengths

Presumably you are thinking of my psychology which, though born of the Christian spirit, seeks to give adequate answers to the spirit of this age: the voice of a doctor struggling to heal the psychic confusion of his time and thus compelled to use a language very different from yours. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 225-226.

I find that all my thoughts circle round God like the planets round the sun, and are as irresistibly attracted by him. I would feel it the most heinous sin were I to offer any resistance to this compelling force. I feel it is God's will that I should exercise the gift of thinking that has been vouchsafed me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 235-238.

As long as you [Victor White] do not identify yourself with the avenging angel, I can feel your humanity and I can tell you that I am really sorry for my misdeeds and sore about God's ways with the poor anthropoids that were meant to have a brain enabling them to think critically. ~Carl Jung, Letters, Vol. II, Pages 238-243.

You overlook the facts and then think that the name is the fact, and thus you reach the nonsensical conclusion that I hypostatize ideas and am therefore a "Gnostic." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 244-245.

It seems to me one more proof of the overweening gnostic tendency in philosophical thinking to ascribe to God qualities which are the product of our own anthropomorphic formulations. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 254-256.

All statements about and beyond the "ultimate" are anthropomorphisms and, if anyone should think that when he says "God" he has also predicated God, he is endowing his words with magical power. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.

I am not a word-magician or word-fetishist who thinks he can posit or call up a metaphysical reality with his incantations. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.

If theologians think that whenever they say "God" then God is, they are deifying anthropomorphisms, psychic structures and myths. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.

Tantra Yoga gives the classic localizations of thought: anahata, thinking (or localization of consciousness) in the chest region (phrenes); visuddha (localized in the larynx), verbal thinking; and ajna, vision, symbolized by an eye in the forehead, which is attained only when verbal image and object are no longer identical, i.e., when their participation mystique is abolished. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.

His "psychological" style is definitely schizophrenic, with the difference, however, that the ordinary patient cannot help talking and thinking in such a way, while [James] Joyce willed it and moreover developed it with all his creative forces. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 266.

People who think that they know the reasons for everything are unaware of the obvious fact that the existence of the universe itself is one big unfathomable secret, and so is our human existence. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 252-253.

It should be noted that music is a primitive means of putting people into a state of frenzy; one has only to think of the drumming at the dances of shamans and medicine-men, or of the flute-playing at the Dionysian orgies. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 330-332.

In these terrible days when evil is once again inundating the world in every conceivable form, I want you to know that I am thinking of you and of your family in Hungary, and hope with you that the avenging angel will pass by their door. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 336.

Since my language is a reflection of my thinking and feeling, I cannot, when faced with a wider public, express myself otherwise than as I am, and I am anything but uncomplicated. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 357-358.

Nothing is thereby asserted, nothing denied, and this is just what Buber doesn't understand; for he is a theologian who naively thinks that what he believes must necessarily be so. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 367-368

We may think of the Irish monk as a man who still has one foot in the animistic world of nature-demons with its intense passions, and the other in the new Christian order symbolized by the Cross, which condenses the primordial chaos into the unity of the personality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 387-388

I think you are correct in assuming that synchronicity, though in practice a relatively rare phenomenon, is an all-pervading factor or principle in the universe, i.e., in the Unus Mundus, where there is no incommensurability between so-called matter and so-called psyche. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 398-400

I do not believe and do not disbelieve in the existence of UFOS. I simply do not know what to think about their alleged physical existence. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 403-404

I think I understand ecclesiastical Christianity but the theologians do not understand me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 423-424

It is unthinkable that a world could have existed before time and space, for whatever world we can imagine is always bound to time and space and hence to causality. The most we can imagine is that there are statistical exceptions to such a world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445-449

The childish prejudice against inherited archetypes is mostly due to the fact that one thinks archetypes are representations; but in reality they are preferences or "penchants," likes and dislikes. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 450-451

Not your thinking, but your essence, is differentiation. Therefore you must not strive for what you conceive as distinctiveness, but for your own essence. At bottom, therefore, there is only one striving, namely the striving for one's own essence. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Scrutinies; Page 348.

Yet I think of myself as a Christian, since I am entirely based upon Christian concepts. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 580-581

After thinking all this over I have come to the conclusion that being "made in the likeness" applies not only to man but also to the Creator: he resembles man or is his likeness, which is to say that he is just as unconscious as man or even more unconscious, since according to the myth of the incarnatio he actually felt obliged to become man and offer himself to man as a sacrifice. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 493-496

He still thinks in terms of mass-hygiene and has nightmares about mass killing. Why should he learn about the unconscious, the mother of the future?! Man still hopes, in a primitive way, that not knowing, not naming, not seeing a danger would remove it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 496-497

The difference between the two kinds of thinking struck me a long time ago, and for my domestic use I have described the first kind as two-dimensional and the second kind as three-dimensional. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 481-482

But if the believer without religion now thinks that he has got rid of mythology he is deceiving himself: he cannot get by without "myth." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488

The introvert needs the object for his thinking, because it is precisely via the object that he adapts to outer reality. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Schmid Correspondence, Pages 55-62.

The term “introversion” thus describes an inward turning of the psychic energy, which I called “libido,” because the introvert does not comprehend the object directly, but by means of abstraction, that is, by a thinking process that is inserted between himself and the object. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Schmid Guisan Correspondence, Pages 55-62.

I think it is even better to make ready for the great catastrophe than to hope that it will not take place and that we are allowed to continue the dream-state of our immaturity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 512-513

You can easily find out from my books what I think about religion (e.g., "Psychology and Religion''). I profess no "belief." I know that there are experiences one must pay "religious" attention to. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 517-518

It may be a prejudice to think that the world of human ideas is conditioned by archetypes, but it is also a means of grasping something of the psychology of another organism. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 504-506

Thinking is difficult, therefore let the herd pronounce judgment! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 344, Para 652.

Your aggressive critique has got me in the rear. That's all. Don't worry! I think of you [Victor White] in everlasting friendship. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 544-546

Moreover there are not a few introverts who are so painfully aware of the shortcomings of their attitude that they have learned to imitate
the extraverts and behave accordingly, and vice versa there are extraverts who like to give themselves the air of the introvert because
they think they are then more interesting. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 564-565

The representation of the extravert refers completely to the object and is, therefore, in complete agreement with outer reality, while his thinking is in agreement with his own inner reality. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Schmid Correspondence, Pages 55-62.

This is not the case in the introvert. His representation of things is inadequate, precisely because of the lack of feeling- into [the object]. His thinking is in accordance with outer reality, but not with his own inner reality. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Schmid Correspondence, Pages 55-62.

This explains the often- observed fact that the introvert thinks and preaches all sorts of nice things but does not do them himself, in fact, does the contrary; whereas the extravert does all sorts of good and nice things but does not think them, in fact, often the contrary. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Schmid Correspondence, Pages 55-62.

I would say: the introvert also tries, through the hypothesis of abstraction, to reach the object, actually reality, which seems to him chaotic only because of the projection of his unused and therefore undeveloped feeling. He tries to conquer the object by thinking. But he wants to reach the object quite as much as the extravert. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Schmid Correspondence, Pages 55-62.

The outer opposition is an image of my inner opposition. Once I realize this, I remain silent and think of the chasm of antagonism in my soul. Outer oppositions are easy to overcome. They indeed exist, but nevertheless you can be united with yourself. They will indeed burn and freeze your soles, but only your soles. It hurts, but you continue and look toward distant goals. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 279.

. . . my father did not dare to think, because he was consumed by inward doubts. He was taking refuge from himself and therefore insisted on blind faith. ~Carl Jung, MDR, Page 73.

Analysis would have been unthinkable in the Middle Ages, because those men were freely expressing those values from which we have cut ourselves off today. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 60

Take an intellectual man and confront him with a woman who is a highly differentiated feeling type and there is a mutual disappointment, each finding the other empty and dry. Impersonal feeling and thinking are very relativistic. ~Carl Jung, 125 Seminar, Page 66

We cannot get anywhere in analysis with thinking until it reaches its antinomy—that is, something is and is not true at one and the same time. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 66

As a natural scientist, thinking and sensation were uppermost in me and intuition and feeling were in the unconscious and contaminated by the collective unconscious. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 75

Of course it is quite useful to us to have the idea that our thoughts are free expressions of our intentional thinking, otherwise we would never be free from the magic circle of nature. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 82

After all, we really can think, even if not with an absolute independence from nature; but it is the duty of the psychologist to make the double statement, and while admitting man’s power of thought, to insist also on the fact that he is trapped in his own skin, and therefore always has his thinking influenced by nature in a way he cannot wholly control. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 83

We do not think thus, and so we no longer take our thoughts as nature; the very way thought processes work in us keeps us from the notion that nature has spoken to us when we have thought. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 83

When you think of a snake, you are always in touch with racial instinct. Horses and monkeys have snake phobia, as man has. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 102

For example, you can run across people who think themselves born without a religious sense, and this is just as absurd as if they said they were born without eyes. It simply means they have left all that side of themselves in the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 114

Take the goodness expressed in Christianity, for instance. That is apparent to us, but get outside of your own skin and into that of a Polynesian native, and Christianity looks very black indeed. Or ask the Spanish heretics who have been burned for the glory of God what they think of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 119

I have been tremendously impressed with the animal character of the unconscious of woman, and I have reason to think that her relation to the Dionysian element is a very strong one. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 124

When it comes to the rather delicate task of locating the collective unconscious, you must not think of it as being compassed by the brain alone but as including the sympathetic nervous system as well. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 140

He thinks the sensation type spends his life with corpses, but once he has taken up this inferior function in himself, he begins to enjoy the object as it really is and for its own sake instead of seeing it through an atmosphere of his projections. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 90

In the process of directed thinking, thoughts are handled as tools, they are made to serve the purposes of the thinker; while in passive thinking thoughts are like individuals going about on their own as it were. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 28

Fantastical thinking knows no hierarchy; the thoughts may even be antagonistic to the ego. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 28

I was in my consciousness an active thinker accustomed to subjecting my thoughts to the most rigorous sort of direction, and therefore fantasizing was a mental process that was directly repellent to me. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 28

Or, to put it even more strongly, passive thinking seemed to me such a weak and perverted thing that I could only handle it through a diseased woman. As a matter of fact, Miss Miller did afterwards become entirely deranged. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 28

The author shows an amazingly sympathetic knowledge of the introvert of the thinking type, and hardly less for the other types. . . . Jung has revealed the inner kingdom of the soul marvelously well and has made the signal discovery of the value of phantasy. His book has a manifold reach and grasp, and many reviews with quite different subject matter could be written about it.” ~Sonu Shamdasani, Introduction 1925 Seminar, Page xi

Abstract thinking can lead us no further than to intellectual sophistries, which are invariably used as shields and subterfuges and are calculated to prevent the realization of the whole. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 617-620

The theologian, the only person besides the psychotherapist to declare himself responsible for the cura animarum, is afraid of having to think psychologically about the objects of his belief. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 628-630

Again one has only to think of the craze for Negro dances, for the Charleston and jazz—they are all symptoms of the great longing of the mass psyche for this more complete—development of the powers immanent within us which primitives possess to a higher degree than we do. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 38-46

In short, the introvert thinks with the object, the extravert feels with it. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Schmid Correspondence, Pages 74-86

The abstract thinking of the introvert is a parallel to this. It is so much in accordance with outer reality that unconsciously it is completely saturated with, and contingent upon, the lusting for power in the world. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Schmid, Pages 74-86

When I violate the extravert with my abstract thinking, this is a fact, and this fact cannot be dismissed even if I insist that the other is merely thinking concretistically. ~Carl Jung, Hans Schmid Guisan Letters, Pages 100-114

Thinking is life just as much as doing is. ~Carl Jung, Hans Schmid Guisan Letters, Pages 100-114

Thinking is not merely a “realization” of life; life can also be a “realization” of thinking. ~Carl Jung, Hans Schmid Guisan Letters, Pages 100-114

You are again forgetting that life stands on two legs, doing and thinking. ~Carl Jung, Han Guisan Schmid, Pages 131-142

Go to bed. Think of your problem. See what you dream. Perhaps the Great Man, the 2,000,000-year-old man, will speak. In a cul-de-sac, then only do you hear his voice. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

Think of nearly two thousand years of Christian Idealism followed, not by the return of the Messiah and the heavenly millennium, but by the World War among Christian nations with its barbed wire and poison gas. What a catastrophe in heaven and on earth! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Pages 76-77

I have to remark, by the way, that there is at least one thing the introvert can do better than the extravert, and that is thinking. ~Carl Jung, Han Guisan Schmid, Pages 131-142

The extravert (the ideal type) must realize his feeling, the corresponding introvert his thinking. In this process, the extravert notices that his feeling is pregnant with thoughts; the introvert, that his thinking is full of feelings. ~Carl Jung, Han Guisan Schmid, Pages 131-142

An introvert who does not outgrow his constant thinking is just as untenable as an extravert who cannot get out of his constant feeling. ~Carl Jung, Han Guisan Schmid, Pages 131-142

Thinking is an act of the soul whereby it becomes conscious of itself and of other things outside itself. ~Carl Jung; Symbols of Transformation; Page 11, Footnote 2.

The self would be the preceding stage, a being that is more than man and that definitely manifests; that is the thinker of our thoughts, the doer of our deeds, the maker of our lives, yet it is still within the reach of human experience. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 977-978

You could think of it [Self] as an intermediary, or a hierarchy of ever-widening-out figures of the self-till one arrives at the conception of a deity. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 977-978.

It is just an illusion when you think the right thought in your head means a reality; it is a reality as far as a thought reality reaches; the thought itself is real, but it has not become a reality in space. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 202

The self would be the preceding stage, a being that is more than man and that definitely manifests; that is the thinker of our thoughts, the doer of our deeds, the maker of our lives, yet it is still within the reach of human experience. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1348

The great lure of the archetypal situation is that you yourself suddenly cease to be. You cease to think and are acted upon as though carried by a great river with no end. You are suddenly eternal. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 240.

Do you think that somewhere we are not in nature, that we are different from nature? No, we are in nature and we think exactly like nature. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1277

For alchemy is the mother of the essential substance as well as the concreteness of modern scientific thinking, and not scholasticism, which was responsible in the main only for the discipline and training of the intellect. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 266.

Our civilization has long since forgotten how to think symbolically. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 683.

Even the man whom we think we know best and who assures us himself that we understand him through and through is at bottom a stranger to us. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 363.

But besides that [Intellect] 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, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 794

Life behaves as if it were going on, and so I think it is better for an old person to live on, to look forward to the next day, as if he had to spend centuries, and then he lives properly. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 438

I have never asserted, nor do I think I know, what the unconscious is in itself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 196.

When you step out of this world, you withdraw and think you are alone with yourself, but the East says: “You forget the old man that is dwelling in your heart and sees everything.” ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Page 75.

James Hillman was asked by interviewer Cliff Bostock what he thought of Noll’s books on Jung. I hate them, Hillman replied. I think he’s a shit. ~James Hillman: Therapy and the Image, Creative Loafing

I am essentially an empiricist and have discovered to my cost that when people do not understand me they think I have seen visions. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 121-122

I have not the faintest idea what "psyche" is in itself, yet, when I come to think and speak of it, I must speak of my abstractions, concepts, views, figures, knowing that they are our specific illusions. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 56-57

I think, therefore, that if you keep as closely as possible to concrete reality and try to create yourself there and illuminate the darkness, you will be on a more normal road than when you engross yourself in squaring the circle as a substitute. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 306-307

I often mention your [J.B. Rhine] work to people over here and I think it is of the greatest importance for the understanding of certain peculiar phenomena of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 321-322

We meet with the possibility of a very dangerous misunderstanding here, because if we call becoming conscious becoming spirit, we think that consciousness is spirit and thus mix up the intellect and the spirit. Spirit is in no way intellect, it is something totally different. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940

Consciousness is becoming aware of, making an image or concept of something, and intellect is the ability to think. Neither of these things is spirit. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940.

There is no doubt and no hesitation; the unanimous conviction in Switzerland is that Germany has lost her national honour to an unspeakable degree, and the Germans inasmuch as they still think know it too. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 276

He [Jung] said he had for a long time thought that the brain stem was important in our thinking life and how interested he was that the corpora quadrigemina, the four bodies, was the area, for it confirmed his idea of the importance of the square and the circle as symbols. ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 157

Hegel seems to me a romantic thinker in contrast to Kant and hence a typical child of his time; and as a romantic he is already on the way to psychology. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 194-195

If things are going on like this, I shall in a few years' time be giving a seminar in a nursery which I think would be still more profitable because this kind of teaching forces me to the utmost simplicity of expression. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 187

There again, those people who think of the unconscious as being a psychological tissue contained in one's head are completely bewildered, for they can hardly form an idea of a tissue standing in one's head. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 204-205

In order to give our judgment.. on the character of wholeness, we must supplement our time-conditioned thinking by the principle of correspondence [between outer and inner events], or as I have called it, synchronicity." C.G. Jung, Aion, para 409

My exterior is in strange contrast to my spirit. When I am dead, nobody will think that this is the corpse of one with spiritual aspirations. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 59

The vast majority of people are quite incapable of putting themselves individually into the mind of another. This is indeed a singularly rare art, and, truth to tell, it does not take us very far. Even the man whom we think we know best and who assures us himself that we understand him through and through is at bottom a stranger to us. He is different. The most we can do, and the best, is to have at least some inkling of his otherness, to respect it, and to guard against the outrageous stupidity of wishing to interpret it. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 363

We shall probably get nearest to the truth if we think of the conscious and personal psyche as resting upon the broad basis of an inherited and universal psychic disposition which is as such unconscious, and that our personal psyche bears the same relation to the collective psyche as the individual to society. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 234