Jung Quotes

“Poets create from the very depths of the collective unconscious, voicing aloud what others only dream.”

(_CW_ 6: 323)

“What is stirred in us is that faraway background, those immemorial patterns of the human mind, which we have not acquired but have inherited from the dim ages of the past.”

(“The Structure of the Psyche” [_CW_ 8: 315])

“Just as the body bears the traces of its phylogenetic development, so also does the human mind.” 

(“General Aspects of Dream Psychology” [_CW_ 8: 475])

“There is no consciousness without discrimination of opposites.”

(_CW_ 9i: 178)

“How else could it have occurred to man to divide the cosmos, on the analogy of day and night, summer and winter, into a bright day-world and a dark night-world peopled with fabulous monsters, unless he had the prototype of such a division in himself, in the polarity between the conscious and the invisible and unknowable unconscious?”

(_CW_ 9i: 187)

“The darkness which clings to every personality is the door into the unconscious and the gateway of dreams, from which those two twilight figures, the shadow and the anima, step into our nightly visions or, remaining invisible, take possession of our ego-consciousness.”   

(_CW_ 9i: 222)

“the anima is bipolar and can therefore appear positive one moment and negative the next; now young, now old; now mother, now maiden; now a good fairy, now a witch; now a saint, now a whore.” 

(_CW_ 9i: 356)

“In some way or other we are part of a single, all-embracing psyche, a single ‘greatest man.” 

(“The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man” [_CW_ 10: 175])

“The upheaval of our world and the upheaval of our consciouness are one and the same.”   

(“The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man” [_CW_ 10: 177])

“The spirit is the life of the body seen from within, and the body the outward manifestation of the life of the spirit–the two being really one. . . .”   

(“The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man” [_CW_ 10: 195])

“The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends.”

(_CW_ 10: 304)

“You can take away a man’s gods, but only to give him others in return.”

(_The_Undiscovered_Self_ [_CW_ 10: 544])

“Every psychic advance of man arises from the suffering of the soul.”   

(“Psychotherapists or the Clergy” [_CW_ 11: 497])

“It is, moreover, only in the state of complete abandonment and loneliness that we experience the helpful powers of our own natures.”

(“Psychotherapists or the Clergy” [_CW_ 11: 525])

 “What is meant [by the child archetype] is the boy who is born from the maturity of the adult man, and not the unconscious child we would like to remain.”   

(_Answer_to_Job_ [_CW_ 11: 742])

“Even the enlightened person . . . 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.”

(_Answer_to_Job_ [_CW_ 11: 758])

“The world of gods and spirits is truly ‘nothing but’ the collective unconscious inside me.”   

(“On ‘The Tibetan Book of the Dead” [_CW_ 11: 857])

“The mother stands for the collective unconscious, the source of the water of life.”   

(“Individual Dream Symbolism” [_CW_ 12: 92])

“The primordial image, or archetype, is a figure–be it a daemon, a human being, or a process–that constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. . . . In each of these images there is a little piece of human psychology and human fate, a remnant of the joys and sorrows that have been repeated countless times in our ancestral history. . . .”

(“On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry” [_CW_ 15: 127])

“At such moments [“when an archetypal situation occurs”] we are no longer individuals, but the race. . . .”   

(“On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry” [_CW_ 15: 128])

“Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices. . . .”   

(“On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry” [_CW_ 15: 129])
 

“The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present.”

(“On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry” [_CW_ 15: 130])

“Have the horrors of the World War done nothing to open our eyes, so that we still cannot see that the conscious mind is even more devilish and perverse than the naturalness of the unconscious?”   

(_CW_ 16: 327)

“Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman. . . . This image is fundamentally unconscious, an hereditary factor of primordial origin . . . an imprint or ‘archetype’ of all the ancestral experiences of the female, a deposit, as it were, of all the impressions ever made by woman. . . .”   

(“Marriage as a Psychological Relationship” [_CW_ 17: 338])

“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.   

(_MDR_, “Prologue”)

 “I can still recall vividly how Freud said to me, ‘My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. . . . 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.'”   

(_MDR_, Ch. 5)

“Archetypes speak the language of high rhetoric, even of bombast.”

(_MDR_, Ch. 6)

“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.”   

(_MDR_, Ch. 8 )

“I am an orphan, alone; nevertheless I am found everywhere. I am one, but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons.”

(_MDR_, Ch. 8 )

“. . . we have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us  from our roots.” 

(_MDR_, Ch. 8 )

“Knowledge does not enrich us; it removes us more and more from the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth.”

(_MDR_, Ch. 9)

“The longing for light is the longing for consciousness.”

(_MDR_, Ch. 9)

“A belief proves to me only the phenomenon of belief, not the content of the belief.”  

(_MDR_, Ch. 11)

“. . . Christianity slumbers and has neglected to develop its myth further in the course of the centuries. . . . Our myth has become mute, and gives no answers.”   

(_MDR_, Ch. 12)

“When people say I am wise, or a sage, I cannot accept it. A man once dipped a hatful of water from a stream. What did that amount to? I am not that stream. I am at the stream, but I do nothing. Other people are at the same stream, but most of them find they have to do something with it. I do nothing. I never think that I am the one who must see to it that cherries grow on stalks. I stand and behold, admiring what nature can do.” 

(_MDR_, “Retrospect”)

“Upon every gift that cometh from the god-sun the devil layeth his curse.”   

(_MDR_, Appendix V [“Septem Sermones ad Mortuos”])

“The deeper ‘layers’ of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat further and further into darkness. . . . they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body’s materiality. . . . Hence ‘at bottom’ the psyche is simply ‘world.'”   

(“The Special Phenomenology of the Child Archetype” [pt. 2] [_Psyche_&_Symbol_])

“The sea is the favorite symbol for the unconscious, the mother of all that lives.”   

(“Special Phenomenology” [pt. 4] [_Psyche_&_ _Symbol_])
      

 Sources: Collected Works, Memories, Dreams, Reflections Psyche and Symbol

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