Carl Jung - Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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

Carl Jung
I know every numbskull will babble on about "black man," "maneater," "chance," and "retrospective interpretation," in order to banish something terribly inconvenient that might sully the familiar picture of childhood innocence. Ah, these good, efficient, healthy-minded people, they always remind me of those optimistic tadpoles who bask in a puddle in the sun, in the shallowest of waters, crowding together and amiably wriggling their tails, totally unaware that the next morning the puddle will have dried up and left them stranded.

Carl Jung
I have always tried to make room for anything that wanted to come to me from within.

Carl Jung
A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon.

Carl Jung
At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the plashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons.

Carl Jung
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.

Carl Jung
It is only natural that I should constantly have revolved in my mind the question of the relationship of the symbolism of the unconscious to Christianity as well as to other religions. Not only do I leave the door open for the Christian message, but I consider it of central importance for Western man. It needs, however, to be seen in a new light, in accordance with the changes wrought by the contemporary spirit.

Carl Jung
Sometimes I had an overwhelming urge to speak, not about that, but only to hint that there were some curious things about me which no one knew of. I wanted to find out whether other people had undergone similar experiences. I never succeeded in discovering so much as a trace of them in others. As a result, I had the feeling that I was either outlawed or elect, accursed or blessed.

Carl Jung
Life is – or has – meaning and meaninglessness. I cherish the anxious hope that meaning will preponderate and win the battle.

Carl Jung
The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance.... If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change.

Carl Jung
I am looking forward enormously to getting back to the sea again, where the overstimulated psyche can recover in the presence of that infinite peace and spaciousness.

Carl Jung
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.

Carl Jung
The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life.

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

Carl Jung
The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

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

Carl Jung
All my writings may be considered tasks imposed from within, their source was a fateful compulsion. What I wrote were things that assailed me from within myself. I permitted the spirit that moved me to speak out.

Carl Jung
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. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

Carl Jung
Anyone who attempts to do both, to adjust to his group and at the same time pursue his individual goal, becomes neurotic.

Carl Jung
The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith.

Carl Jung
I want to be freed neither from human beings, nor from myself, nor from nature; for all these appear to me the greatest of miracles.

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

Carl Jung
I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgement about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions – not about anything really. I only know that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along.

Carl Jung
Six weeks after his death my father appeared to me in a dream... It was an unforgettable experience, and it forced me for the first time to think about life after death.

Carl Jung
Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them.

Carl Jung
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.

Carl Jung
Moreover, my ancestors' souls are sustained by the atmosphere of the house, since I answer for them the questions that their lives once left behind. I carve out rough answers as best I can. I have even drawn them on the walls. It is as if a silent, greater family, stretching down the centuries, were peopling the house.

Carl Jung