Carl Jung: "The Undiscovered Self" - Quotations

We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a "metamorphosis of the gods," i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 110.

Reason alone does not suffice. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 98.

It is astounding that man, the instigator, inventor and vehicle of all these developments, the originator of all judgments and decisions and the planner of the future must make himself such a quantité negligeable. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 45.

Human knowledge consists essentially in the constant adaptation of the primordial patterns of ideas that were given us a priori. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Page 49.

You can take away a man's gods, but only to give him others in return. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self Page 63

The seat of faith, however, is not consciousness but spontaneous religious experience, which brings the individual's faith into immediate relation with God. Here we must ask: Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd? ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 85

It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 72.

"The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual." ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 10.

Instinct is anything but a blind and indefinite impulse, since it proves to be attuned and adapted to a definite external situation. This latter circumstance gives it its specific and irreducible form. Just as instinct is original and hereditary, so too, its form is age-old, that is to say, archetypal. It is even older and more conservative than the body's form. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 49.

Nothing has a more divisive and alienating effect upon society than this moral complacency and lack of responsibility, and nothing promotes understanding and rapprochement more than the mutual withdrawal of projections." ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 72.

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.

Were not the autonomy of the individual the secret longing of many people, this hard-pressed phenomenon would scarcely be able to survive the collective suppression either morally or spiritually. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Page 34.

If the psyche must be granted an overriding empirical importance, so also must the individual, who is the only immediate manifestation of the Psyche. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Page 34.

The carrier of this consciousness is the individual, who does not produce the psyche on his own volition but is, on the contrary, pre-formed by it and nourished by the gradual awakening of consciousness during childhood. ~Carl Jung, The undiscovered Self, Page 34.

Thus the psyche is endowed with the dignity of a cosmic principle, which philosophically and in fact gives it a position coequal with the principle of physical being. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Page 33.

The structure and physiology of the brain furnish no explanation of the psychic process. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Page 33.

It would also be the task of the confessor zealous in the cure of souls, were it not that his office inevitably obliges him to apply the yardstick of his denominational bias at the critical moment. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Page 37.

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and consciously expressed by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Page 33

…people deny the findings of parapsychology outright, either for philosophical reasons or from intellectual laziness. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Page 33.

…Man is an enigma to himself. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Page 31.