Memories Dreams Reflections Quotes

Without freedom there can be no morality.

That which compels us to create a substitute for ourselves is not the external lack of objects, but our incapacity to lovingly include a thing outside of ourselves

All ages before ours believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment in symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, which is to say, as archetypes of the unconscious. No doubt this discovery is hardly credible as yet.

A shoe that fits one person pinches another.

The word ‘belief’ is a difficult thing for me. I don’t believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it – I don’t need to believe it.

The Wrong we have Done, Thought, or Intended Will wreak its Vengeance on Our SOULS.

Space flights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because it is easier to go to Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one’s own being.

A dream that is not understood remains a mere occurrence; understood it becomes a living experience.

In actual life it requires the greatest discipline to be simple, and the acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook upon life.

We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.

The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.

We have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.

The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul.

The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semihuman, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, “divine.”

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life – that is to say, over 35 – there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.

The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.

Just as man as a social being, cannot in the long run exist without a tie to the community, so the individual will never find the real justification for his existence, and his own spiritual and moral autonomy, anywhere except in an extramundane principle capable of relativizing the overpowering influence of external factors.

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

The longing for light is the longing for consciousness.

I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once and cannot add up the sum.

When you succeed in awakening the Kundalini, so that it starts to move out of its mere potentiality, you necessarily start a world which is totally different from our world. It is the world of eternity.

Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.

There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

Deep down, below the surface of the average man’s conscience, he hears a voice whispering, “There is something not right,” no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or moral code.

The girl dreams she is dangerously ill. Suddenly birds come out of her skin and cover her completely … Swarms of gnats obscure the sun, the moon, and all the stars except one. That one start falls upon the dreamer.

Faith, hope, love, and insight are the highest achievements of human effort. They are found-given-by experience.

The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.

Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

When religion stops talking about animals it will be all downhill.

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.

The time is a critical one, for it marks the beginning of the second half of life, when a metanoia, a mental transformation, not infrequently occurs. (on being 36 yrs old)

If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.

Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it.

We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. He is already on the way; he is like Mohammad. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with wild god. That can be the historic future.

I could not say I believe. I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God.

Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.

The sight of a child…will arouse certain longings in adult, civilized persons — longings which relate to the unfulfilled desires and needs of those parts of the personality which have been blotted out of the total picture in favor of the adapted persona.

Nature has no use for the plea that one ‘did not know’.

Mind and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing.

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.

Intuition (is) perception via the unconscious

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.

I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it.

As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.

The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not — which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams.

We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos – the right moment – for a ‘metamorphosis of the gods’, 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.

In each of us there is another whom we do not know.

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

We cannot change anything unless we accept it.

What we do not make conscious emerges later as fate.

…it seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making. I wnt about with all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they were patients and I was analyzing them. I read a Greek or Negro myth as if a lunatic were telling me his anamnesis.

The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents.

My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.

Every man carries within himself the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definite feminine image. This image is fundamentally unconscious, a hereditary factor of primordial origin.

For a woman, the typical danger emanating from the unconscious comes from above, from the “spiritual” sphere personified by the animus, whereas for a man it comes from the chthonic realm of the “world and woman,” i.e., the anima projected on to the world.

The whole nature of man presupposes woman, both physically and spiritually. His system is tuned into woman from the start, just as it is prepared for a quite definite world where there is water, light, air, salt, carbohydrates etc.

Warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.

Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.

The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things.

The sure path can only lead to death.

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.

Primitive superstition lies just below the surface of even the most tough-minded individuals, and it is precisely those who most fight against it who are the first to succumb to its suggestive effects.

No matter what the world thinks about religious experience, the one who has it possesses a great treasure, a thing that has become for him a source of life, meaning, and beauty, and that has given a new splendor to the world and to mankind.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

Even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky

Freedom stretches only as far as the limits of our consciousness.

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

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 considered by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being.

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.

We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything more.

Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event.

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

The seat of faith, however, is not consciousness but spontaneous religious experience, which brings the individual’s faith into immediate relation with God.

Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche.

Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.

The growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement.

If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely.

We cannot imagine events that are connected non-causally and are capable of a non-causal explanation. But that does not mean that such events do not exist.

It is sad but unfortunately true that man learns nothing from history.

Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.

Even if the whole world were to fall to pieces, the unity of the psyche would never be shattered.

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.

Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.

The judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows it to realize its supreme purpose through him.

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.

Nights through dreams tell the myths forgotten by the day.

My interests drew me in different directions. On the one hand I was powerfully attracted by science, with its truths based on facts; on the other hand I was fascinated by everything to do with comparative religion. […] In science I missed the factor of meaning; and in religion, that of empiricism.

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument.

No language exists that cannot be misused… Every Interpretation is hypothetical, for it is a mere attempt to read an unfamiliar text.

Great talents are the most lovely and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off.

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.

It is high time that we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to preach the art of seeing.

If we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us. –“The Content of the Psychoses