Some Carl Jung Quotations

To the former [Mathematician], number is a means of counting; to the latter [Psychology], it is a discovered entity capable of making individual statements if it is given a chance. In other words: in the former case number is a servant, in the latter case an autonomous being. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 405.

In my later years (I am now in my 83rd) I became doubtful, since I have received so much love and consideration that I have no reason to grumble. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 405.

I am now in my 83rd year and my creative work has come to an end. I am watching the setting sun. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 405.

There are far more people than one supposes who are not disturbed by noise, for they have nothing in them that could be disturbed; on the contrary, noise gives them something to live for. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 390.

I soon understood that parapsychological facts are interwoven with psychic conditions and cannot be really understood without psychology. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 375.

The very existence of alchemistic philosophy proves that the spiritualization process within Christian psychology did not yield satisfactory results. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 401.

While I am writing this I observe a little demon trying to abscond my words and even my thoughts and turning them over into the rapidly flowing river of images, surging from the mists of the past, portraits of a little boy, bewildered and wondering at an incomprehensibly beautiful and hideously profane and deceitful world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 408.

Thus on New Year's Eve I had a great dream about my wife, which I will tell you sometime. It seems that individuation is a ruthlessly important task to which everything else should take second place. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 408.

Hoyle's book has arrived and I've finished it already. It is extraordinarily interesting to see how an astronomer collides with the unconscious and especially with the Ufo problem. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 408.

Hoyle has the rotundum, the doctrine of the Anthropos, the cosmic wisdom of matter, which he naturally confuses with consciousness, and so fails to do justice to the problem of suffering. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 408.

The anima is a representative of the unconscious and hence a mediatrix, just as the Beata Virgo is called "mediatrix" in the dogma of the Assumption. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 423.

On the one hand the anima is an allurement to an intensification of life, but on the other she opens our eyes to its religious aspect. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 423.

The primordial experience is not concerned with the historical bases of Christianity but consists in an immediate experience of God (as was had by Moses, Job, Hosea, Ezekiel among others) which "convinces" because it is "overpowering." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 424.

One can only say that somehow one has to reach the rim of the world or get to the end of one's tether in order to partake of the terror or grace of such an experience at all. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 424.

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

Wherever our need for knowledge may turn we stumble upon opposites, which ultimately determine the structure of existence. The centre is the indivisible monad of the self, the unity and wholeness of the experiencing subject. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 424.

Our Christian theology is obviously not based "on the total religious experience." It does not even consider the ambivalent experience of the Old Testament God. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 422.

On the other hand it is just the Trinity dogma, as it stands, that is the classical example of an artificial structure and an intellectual product, so much so that no theologian has yet recognized or admitted its origin in Egyptian theology. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 423.

Everything that can be repeated experimentally is necessarily causal, for the whole concept of causality is based on this statistical result. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 420.

The experimental activation of an archetypal situation has to be explained causally, since there is no possibility of explaining it otherwise and no reason to do so. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 420.

How it comes about that space and time are reduced by these meaningful chance occurrences cannot be understood in terms of causality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 420.

With regard to the horoscope I have serious doubts whether it can be understood as a purely synchronistic phenomenon, for there are unquestionable causal connections between the planetary aspects and the powerful effects of proton radiation, though we are still very much in the dark as to what its physiological effects might be. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 421.

Even the earlier name "Helvetii" did not sit with them naturally. No other people could live here as they would then have the wrong ancestral spirits, who dwell in the earth and are authentic Swiss. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 419.

Sitting in the central mussel-shell, we are the "sons of the mother." Hence the old astrological tradition says that our zodiacal sign is Virgo. However, there is no unanimity on this score, since the other version says that our sign is Taurus. It is a virile, creative sign, but earthly like Virgo. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 419.

This ancient psychological insight expresses the fact that what is enclosed in the mother is a germinating seed that will one day burst through, as you have shown with other words and convincing examples. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 419.

As psychologists we are not concerned with the question of truth, with whether something is historically correct, but with living forces, living opinions which determine human behaviour. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 417