Carl Jung - Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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

Carl Jung
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.

Carl Jung
Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The "newness" in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components.

Carl Jung
It had become clear to me, in a flash of illumination, that for me the only possible goal was psychiatry. Here alone the two currents of my interest could flow together and in a united stream dig their own bed. Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found. Here at last was the place where the collision of nature and spirit became a reality.

Carl Jung
Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche

Carl Jung
It was most essential for me to have a normal life in the real world as a counterpoise to that strange inner world. My family and my profession remained the base to which I could return...

Carl Jung
I can still recall vividly how Freud said to me, "My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark"... In some astonishment I asked him, "A bulwark-against what?" To which he replied, "Against the black tide of mud"-and here he hesitated for a moment, then added of occultism.

Carl Jung
At bottom we discover nothing new and unknown in the mentally ill; rather, we encounter the substratum of our own natures.

Carl Jung
Anyone who takes the sure road is as good as dead.

Carl Jung
The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole.

Carl Jung
I find that all my thoughts circle around God like the planets around the sun, and are as irresistibly attracted by Him. I would feel it to be the grossest sin if I were to oppose any resistance to this force.

Carl Jung
Nature seemed to me full of wonders, and I wanted to steep myself in them. Every stone, every plant, every single thing seemed alive and indescribably marvelous. I immersed myself in nature, crawled, as it were, into the very essence of nature and away from the whole human world.

Carl Jung
The doctor is effective only when he himself is affected. Only the wounded physician heals.

Carl Jung
Nowadays most people identify themselves almost exclusively with their consciousness, and imagine that they are only what they know about themselves.

Carl Jung
But India did not pass me by without a trace: it left tracks which lead me from one infinity to another infinity.

Carl Jung
My mandalas were cryptograms concerning the state of the self which was presented to me anew each day...I guarded them like precious pearls....It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the center. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the center, to individuation.

Carl Jung
The kernel of all jealousy is lack of love.

Carl Jung
Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science.

Carl Jung
Plants were bound for good or ill to their places. They expressed not only beauty but also the thoughts of God's world, with an intent of their own and without deviation. Trees in particular were mysterious and seemed to me direct embodiments of the incomprehensible meaning of life. For that reason, the woods were the places where I felt closest to its deepest meaning and to its awe-inspiring workings.

Carl Jung
We are a psychic process which we do not control, or only partly direct. Consequently, we cannot have any final judgment about ourselves or our lives.

Carl Jung
In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential that we embody. If we do not embody that, life is wasted.

Carl Jung
I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life.

Carl Jung
I studiously avoided all so-called "holy men." I did so because I had to make do with my own truth, not accept from others what I could not attain on my own. I would have felt it as a theft had I attempted to learn from the holy men and to accept their truth for myself. Neither in Europe can I make any borrowings from the East, but must shape my life out of myself-out of what my inner being tells me, or what nature brings to me.

Carl Jung
A book of mine is always a matter of fate. There is something unpredictable about the process of writing, and I cannot prescribe for myself any predetermined course.

Carl Jung
I had to make a confession of faith in stone. That was the beginning of the tower, the house I built for myself at Bollingen.

Carl Jung
In the products of the unconscious we discover mandala symbols, that is, circular and quaternity figures which express wholeness, and whenever we wish to express wholeness, we employ just such figures.

Carl Jung
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.

Carl Jung
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.

Carl Jung
For lack of empirical data I have neither knowledge nor understanding of such forms of being, which are commonly called spiritual.... Nevertheless, we have good reason to suppose that behind this veil there exists the uncomprehended absolute object which affects and influences us—and to suppose it even, or particularly, in the case of psychic phenomena about which no verifiable statements can be made.

Carl Jung
In all earnestness I asked myself what kind of world I had stumbled into.

Carl Jung