Our cerebral consciousness is like an actor who has forgotten that he is playing a role. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 332

And just as the material of the body that is ready for life has need of the psyche in order to be capable of life, so the psyche presupposes the living body in order that its images may live. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 618

For the Chinese, “spirit” does not signify order, meaning, and everything that is good: on the contrary, it is a fiery and sometimes dangerous power. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 939

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. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 408

In the realm of consciousness we are our own masters; we seem to be the “factors” themselves. But if we step through the door of the shadow we discover with terror that we are the objects of unseen factors, ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 49

If only people could realize what an enrichment it is to find one’s own guilt, what a sense of honour and spiritual dignity! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 416

The world is still full of betes noires and scapegoats, just as it formerly teemed with witches and werewolves. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 130

The wise man learns only from his own guilt. He will ask himself: Who am I that all this should happen to me? To find the answer to this fateful question he will look into his own heart. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 152

The danger that faces us today is that the whole of reality will be replaced by words. This accounts for that terrible lack of instinct in modern man, particularly the city-dweller. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 882

We never appreciate how dependent we are on lucky ideas—until we find to our distress that they will not come. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 305

The mere act of enlightenment may have destroyed the spirits of nature, but not the psychic factors that correspond to them, such as suggestibility, lack of criticism, fearfulness, propensity to superstition and prejudice—in short, all those qualities which make possession possible. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 431

All human control comes to an end when the individual is caught in a mass movement. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 395

In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 315

Words like “Society” and “State” are so concretized that they are almost personified. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 554

It is not the will of individuals that moulds the destinies of nations, but supra-personal factors, the spirit and the earth, which work in mysterious ways and in unfathomable darkness. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 921

But it cannot be denied that in the course of the last two centuries Christianity, no less than Confucianism in China and Buddhism in India, has largely forfeited its educative activity. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 326

Most men are erotically blinded—they commit the unpardonable mistake of confusing Eros with sex. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 255

Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself. I fully realize that this proposition must sound well-nigh unintelligible to the man of today. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 43.

People go on blithely organizing and believing in the sovereign remedy of mass action, without the least consciousness of the fact that the most powerful organizations can be maintained only by the greatest ruthlessness of their leaders and the cheapest of slogans. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 40.

Instinct is anything but a blind and indefinite impulse, since it proves to be attuned and adapted to a definite external situation. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 49.

Just as the chaotic movements of the crowd, all ending in mutual frustration, are impelled in a definite direction by a dictatorial will, so the individual in his dissociated state needs a directing and ordering principle. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Pages 43-44.

The individual who is not anchored in God can offer no resistance on his own resources to the physical and moral blandishments of the world. For this he needs the evidence of inner, transcendent experience which alone can protect him from the otherwise inevitable submersion in the mass. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 258.

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. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 258.

Even domestic animals, to whom we erroneously deny a conscience, have complexes and moral reactions. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 446.

Archaic man believes it to be the sun, and civilized man believes it to be the eye—so far, at any rate, as he reflects at all and does not suffer from the disease of the poets. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 135

Great innovations never come from above; they come invariably from below, just as trees never grow from the sky downward, but upward from the earth. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 177

And it is just the people from the obscurer levels who follow the unconscious drive of the psyche; it is the much-derided, silent folk of the land, who are less infected with academic prejudices than the shining celebrities are wont to be. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 177

The primitives I observed in East Africa took it for granted that “big” dreams are dreamed only by “big” men – medicine-men, magicians, chiefs, etc. This may be true on a primitive level. But with us these dreams are dreamed also by simple people, more particularly when they have got themselves, mentally or spiritually, in a fix. ~Carl Jung. CW 10, Page 324.

`Even if the whole world were to fall to pieces, the unity of the psyche would never be shattered. And the wider and more numerous the fissures on the surface, the more the unity is strengthened in the depths. ~Carl Jung; CW 10, Para 310.

The danger that faces us today is that the whole of reality will be replaced by words. This accounts for that terrible lack of instinct in modern man, particularly the city-dweller. He lacks all contact with life and the breath of nature. He knows a rabbit or a cow only from the illustrated paper, the dictionary, or the movies, and thinks he knows what it is really like-and is then amazed that cowsheds “smell,” because the dictionary didn’t say so. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 882.

The struggle between light and darkness has broken out everywhere. The rift runs through the whole globe, and set the fire that is smoldering and glowing Germany ablaze wherever we look. The conflagration that broke out in Germany was the outcome of psychic conditions that are universal. Carl Jung, CW 10, para 485.

To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light. Once one has experienced a few times what it is like to stand judgingly between the opposites, one begins to understand what is meant by the self. Anyone who perceives his shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 872.

. . . 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. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 195.

In some way or other we are part of a single, all-embracing psyche, a single “greatest man.” ~Carl Jung, CW 10: Page 175.

The man who has attained consciousness of the present is solitary. The “modern” man has at all times been so, for every step towards fuller consciousness removes him further from his original, purely animal participation mystique with the herd, from submersion in a common unconsciousness. Every step forward means tearing oneself loose from the maternal womb of unconsciousness in which the mass of men dwells. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 150

The art of interpreting dreams cannot be learnt from books. Methods and rules are good only when we can get along without them. Only the man who can do it anyway has real skill, only the man of understanding really understands. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 327

We still attribute to the other fellow all the evil and inferior qualities that we do not like to recognize in ourselves, and therefore have to criticize and attack him, when all that has happened is that an inferior “soul” has emigrated from one person to another. The world is still full of betes noires and scapegoats, just as it formerly teemed with witches and werewolves. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 130.

The marked tendency of the Western democracies to internal dissension is the very thing that could lead them to a more hopeful path. ~Carl Jung; CW 10; Page 225.

Any large company composed of wholly admirable persons has the morality and intelligence of an unwieldy, stupid and violent animal. ~Carl Jung; CW 10; Page 228

Archetypes are like riverbeds which dry up when the water deserts them, but which it can find again at any time. An archetype is like an old watercourse along which the water of life has flowed for centuries, digging a deep channel for itself. The longer it has flowed in this channel the more likely it is that sooner or later the water will return to its old bed. ~Carl Jung: CW 10, Page 395.

The heaping together of paintings by Old Masters in museums is a catastrophe; likewise, a collection of a hundred Great Brains makes one big fathead. ~Carl Jung; CW 10, Para 944.

The development of modern art with its seemingly nihilistic trend towards disintegration must be understood as the symptom and symbol of a mood of universal destruction and renewal that has set its mark on our age. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Pages 303-304.

It is possible to have an attitude to the external conditions of life only when there is a point of reference outside them. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, par. 506.

Even domestic animals, to whom we erroneously deny a conscience, have complexes and moral reactions. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 446.

Until now it has not truly and fundamentally been noted that our time, despite the prevalence of irreligiosity, is so to speak congenitally charged with the attainment of the Christian epoch, namely with the supremacy of the word, that Logos which the central figure of Christian faith represents. The word has literally become our God and has remained so” ~Carl Jung, CW 10, §554.

I tried to give a general view of the structure of the unconscious. Its contents, the archetypes, are as it were the hidden foundations of the conscious mind, or, to use another comparison, the roots which the psyche has sunk not only in the earth in the narrower sense but in the world in general. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 31.

Archetypes are systems of readiness for action, and at the same time images and emotions. They are inherited with the brain structure—indeed, they are its psychic aspect. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 31.

We shall have to reckon with quite unusual difficulties in dealing with it, and the first of these is that the archetype and its function must be understood far more as a part of man’s prehistoric, irrational psychology than as a rationally conceivable system. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 31.

Phylogenetically as well as ontogenetically we have grown up out of the dark confines of the earth; hence the factors that affected us most closely became archetypes, and it is these primordial images which influence us most directly, and therefore seem to be the most powerful. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 32.

I would like to suggest that every psychic reaction which is out of proportion to its precipitating cause should be investigated as to whether it may be conditioned at the same time by an archetype. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 32.

We should make the archetype responsible only for a definite, minimal, normal degree of fear; any pronounced increase, felt to be abnormal, must have special causes. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 33.

People measure their self-knowledge by what the average person in their social environment knows of himself, but not by the real psychic facts which are for the most part hidden from them. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Par. 491

The upheaval of our world and the upheaval of our consciousness are one and the same. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 177.

Thinking is difficult, therefore let the herd pronounce judgment! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 344, Para 652.

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. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Pages 144-145

Religion means dependence on and submission to the irrational facts of experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 505.

Where is a height without depth, and how can there be light that throws no shadow? There is no good that is not opposed by evil. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 271.

Think of nearly two thousand years of Christian Idealism followed, not by the return of the Messiah and the heavenly millennium, but by the World War among Christian nations with its barbed wire and poison gas. What a catastrophe in heaven and on earth! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Pages 76-77

When you walk with naked feet, how can you ever forget the earth? ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page, Para 988

Therefore, never ask what a man does, but how he does it. If he does it from love or in the spirit of love, then he serves a god; and whatever he may do is not ours to judge, for it is ennobled. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 234

Love is a force of destiny whose power reaches from heaven to hell. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 198.

A man is ill, but the illness is nature’s attempt to heal him. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 361

From the illness itself we can learn so much for our recovery, and what the neurotic flings away as absolutely worthless contains the true gold we should never have found elsewhere. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 361

It is the privilege and the task of maturer people, who have passed the meridian of life, to create culture. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 272

Consciousness is a precondition of being. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 528

Knowledge of God is a transcendental problem. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 565

The attainment of consciousness was the most precious fruit of the tree of knowledge, the magical weapon which gave man victory over the earth, and which we hope will give him a still greater victory over himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 289

The fact that individual consciousness means separation and opposition is something that man has experienced countless times in his long history. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 290

Eternal truths are never true at any given moment in history. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 1004

If the individual is not truly regenerated in spirit, society cannot be either, for society is the sum total of individuals in need of redemption. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 536

In our strength we are independent and isolated, are masters of our own fate; in our weakness we are dependent and bound, and become unwilling instruments of fate, for here it is not the individual will that counts but the will of the species. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 261

But, precisely because the truest and most devoted love is also the most beautiful, let no man seek to make it easy. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 232

He is a sorry knight who shrinks from the difficulty of loving his lady. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 232

Love is like God: both give themselves only to their bravest knights. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 232

Every true and deep love is a sacrifice. The lover sacrifices all other possibilities, or rather, the illusion that such possibilities exist. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 231

When, towards middle life, the last gleam of childhood illusion fades—this it must be owned is true only of an almost ideal life, for many go as children to their graves—then the archetype of the mature man or woman emerges from the parental imago: an image of man as woman has known him from the beginning of time, and an image of woman that man carries within him eternally. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 74

A psychology of neurosis that sees only the negative elements empties out the baby with the bath-water, since it neglects the positive meaning and value of these “infantile”—i.e., creative—fantasies. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 355

Just as there is a relationship of mind to body, so there is a relationship of body to earth. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 19

A civilization does not decay, it regenerates. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 299

Was it not Meister Eckhart who said: “For this reason God is willing to bear the brunt of sins and often winks at them, mostly sending them to people for whom he has prepared some high destiny. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 440

Without guilt, unfortunately, there can be no psychic maturation and no widening of the spiritual horizon. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 440

I know people who feel that the strange power in their own psyche is something divine, for the very simple reason that it has given them an understanding of what is meant by religious experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 312.

They [Religions] express the whole range of the psychic problem in mighty images; they are the avowal and recognition of the soul, and at the same time the revelation of the soul’s nature. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 367

Mere continuation can be left to the animals, but inauguration is the prerogative of man, the one thing he can boast of that lifts him above the beasts. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 268

Unlived life is a destructive, irresistible force that works softly but inexorably. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 252

Here each of us must ask: Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd? Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 564

Religion, as the careful observation and taking account of certain invisible and uncontrollable factors, is an instinctive attitude peculiar to man, and its manifestations can be followed all through human history. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 512

A creed coincides with the established Church or, at any rate, forms a public institution whose members include not only true believers but vast numbers of people who can only be described as “indifferent” in matters of religion and who belong to it simply by force of habit. Here the difference between a creed and a religion becomes palpable. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 508.

Love has more than one thing in common with religious faith. It demands unconditional trust and expects absolute surrender. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112

Just as nobody but the believer who surrenders himself wholly to God can partake of divine grace, so love reveals its highest mysteries and its wonder only to those who are capable of unqualified devotion and loyalty of feeling. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112

The very fact that a man enters into a marriage on trial means that he is making a reservation; he wants to be sure of not burning his fingers, to risk nothing. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112

Love is not cheap—let us therefore beware of cheapening it! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112

All our bad qualities, our egotism, our cowardice, our worldly wisdom, our cupidity—all these would persuade us not to take love seriously. But love will reward us only when we do. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112

I must even regard it as a misfortune that nowadays the sexual question is spoken of as something distinct from love. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112

The two questions should not be separated, for when there is a sexual problem it can be solved only by love. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112

It is one of the most difficult and thankless of tasks to say anything of importance about the civilized man of today … for the speaker finds himself caught in the same presuppositions and is blinded by the same prejudices as those whom he wishes to view from a superior standpoint. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 104

He alone is modern who is fully conscious of the present. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 149

All human control comes to an end when the individual is caught in a mass movement. Then the archetypes begin to function, as happens also in the lives of individuals when they are confronted with situations that cannot be dealt with in any of the familiar ways. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 395

Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 540

It is quite natural that with the triumph of the Goddess of Reason a general neuroticizing of modern man should set in, a dissociation of personality analogous to the splitting of the world today by the Iron Curtain. This boundary line bristling with barbed wire runs through the psyche of modern man, no matter on which side he lives. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 544

If only a world-wide consciousness could arise that all division and all fission are due to the splitting of opposites in the psyche, then we should know where to begin. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 575

The heaping together of paintings by Old Masters in museums is a catastrophe; likewise, a collection of a hundred Great Brains makes one big fathead. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 944

A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 535

The principal and indeed the only thing that is wrong with the world is man. ~ Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 441

Let man but accumulate sufficient engines of destruction and the devil within him will soon be unable to resist putting them to their fated use. It is well known that fire-arms go off of themselves if only enough of them are together. ~Carl Jung, CW 10,

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. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 408

All psychological facts which cannot be verified with the help of scientific apparatus and exact measurement are assertions and opinions, and, as such, are psychic realities. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para, 839

Dreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche, outside the control of the will. They are pure nature; they show us the unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature when our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impasse. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 317

The art of interpreting dreams cannot be learnt from books. Methods and rules are good only when we can get along without them. Only the man who can do it anyway has real skill, only the man of understanding really understands. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 325

One should never forget that one dreams in the first place, and almost to the exclusion of all else, of oneself. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 321

It is amazing how people get caught in words. They imagine that the name postulates the thing—just as if we were doing the devil a serious wrong when we call him a neurosis! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para

The personality of the patient demands all the resources of the doctor’s personality and not technical tricks. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 338

When the ego has been made a “seat of anxiety,” someone is running away from himself and will not admit it. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 360

The elementary fact that a person always thinks another’s psychology is identical with his own effectively prevents a correct understanding of feminine psychology. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 240

Women are increasingly aware that love alone can give them full stature, just as men are beginning to divine that only the spirit can give life its highest meaning. Both seek a psychic relationship, because love needs the spirit, and the spirit love, for its completion. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 269

The love of woman is not sentiment, as is a man’s, but a will that is at times terrifyingly unsentimental and can even force her to self-sacrifice. A man who is loved in this way cannot escape his inferior side, for he can only respond to the reality of her love with his own reality. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 261

In the eyes of the ordinary man, love in its true sense coincides with the institution of marriage, and outside marriage there is only adultery or “platonic” friendship. For woman, marriage is not an institution at all but a human love-relationship. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 255

Relationship is possible only if there is a psychic distance between people, in the same way that morality presupposes freedom. For this reason the unconscious tendency of woman aims at loosening the marriage structure, but not at the destruction of marriage and the family. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 273

Seldom or never does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises. There is no birth of consciousness without pain. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 331

It is impossible to derive any philosophical system from the fundamental thoughts of primitive man. They provide only antinomies, but it is just these that are the inexhaustible source of all spiritual problems in all times and in all civilizations. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 144

Sexuality dished out as sexuality is brutish; but sexuality as an expression of love is hallowed. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 234

in his long history. And just as for the individual a time of dissociation is a time for sickness, so it is in the life of nations. We can hardly deny that ours is a time of dissociation and sickness. The political and social conditions, the fragmentation of religion and philosophy, the contending schools of modern art and modern psychology all have one meaning in this respect. And does anyone who is endowed with the slightest sense of responsibility feel any satisfaction at this turn of events? If we are honest, we must admit that no one feels quite comfortable in the present-day world; indeed, it becomes increasingly uncomfortable. The word “crisis,” so often heard, is a medical expression which always tells us that the sickness has reached a dangerous climax. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 290

So, too, man will be forced to develop his feminine side, to open his eyes to the psyche and to Eros, It is a task he can’ not avoid. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 125.

It is, unfortunately, only too clear that if the individual is not truly regenerated in spirit, society cannot be either, for society is the sum total of individuals in need of redemption. I can therefore see it only as a delusion when the Churches try—as apparently they do—to rope the individual into some social organization and reduce him to a condition of diminished responsibility, instead of raising him out of the torpid, mindless mass and making clear to him that he is the one important factor and that the salvation of the world consists in the salvation of the individual soul. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 536

Magic is the science of the jungle. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 63.

Anything that comes upon me with this intensity I experience as numinous, no matter whether I call it divine or devilish or just “fate.” ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 871

The unconscious is the only available source of religious experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 565

The carrier of this consciousness is the individual, who does not produce the psyche of his own volition but is, on the contrary, preformed by it and nourished by the gradual awakening of consciousness during childhood. If therefore the psyche is of overriding empirical importance, so also is the individual, who is the only immediate manifestation of the psyche. Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 528

All psychological facts which cannot be verified with the help of scientific apparatus and exact measurement are assertions and opinions, and, as such, are psychic realities. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para, 839

Since the gods are without doubt personifications of psychic forces, to assert their metaphysical existence is as much an intellectual presumption as the opinion that they could ever be invented. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 387

The man who has attained consciousness of the present is solitary. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 150

None of us stands outside humanity’s black collective shadow. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 297

We should not try to “get rid” of a neurosis, but rather to experience what it means, what it has to teach, what its purpose is. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 179

A neurosis is truly removed only when it has removed the false attitude of the ego. We do not cure it—it cures us. A man is ill, but the illness is nature’s attempt to heal him, and what the neurotic flings away as absolutely worthless contains the true gold we should never have found elsewhere. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 361

What I am trying to make clear is the remarkable fact that the will cannot transgress the bounds of the psychic sphere: it cannot coerce the instinct, nor has it power over the spirit, in so far as we understand by this something more than the intellect. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Paras 371-381.

The art of interpreting dreams cannot be learnt from books. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 152.

No one who does not know himself can know others. And in each of us there is another whom we do not know. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 152.

What the Christian sacrament of baptism purports to do is a landmark of the utmost significance in the psychic development of mankind. Baptism endows the individual with a living soul. I do not mean that the baptismal rite in itself does this, by a unique and magical act. I mean that the idea of baptism lifts man out of his archaic identification with the world and transforms him into a being who stands above it. The fact that mankind has risen to the level of this idea is baptism in the deepest sense, for it means the birth of the spiritual man who transcends nature. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 136

But God himself cannot flourish if man’s soul is starved. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 275

It is not ethical principles, however lofty, or creeds, however orthodox, that lay the foundations for the freedom and autonomy of the individual, but simply and solely the empirical awareness, the incontrovertible experience of an intensely personal, reciprocal relationship between man and an extramundane authority which acts as a counterpoise to the “world” and its “reason.” ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 509

The tremendous compulsion towards goodness and the immense moral force of Christianity are not merely an argument in the latter’s favour, they are also a proof of the strength of its suppressed and repressed counterpart —the antichristian, barbarian element. The existence within us of something that can turn against us, that can become a serious matter for us, I regard not merely as a dangerous peculiarity, but as a valuable and congenial asset as well. It is a still untouched fortune, an uncorrupted treasure, a sign of youthfulness, an earnest of rebirth. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 20

Thus, the sickness of dissociation in our world is at the same time a process of recovery, or rather, the climax of a period of pregnancy which heralds the throes of birth. A time of dissociation such as prevailed during the Roman Empire is simultaneously an age of rebirth. Not without reason do we date our era from the age of Augustus, for that epoch saw the birth of the symbolical figure of Christ, who was invoked by the early Christians as the Fish, the Ruler of the aeon of Pisces which had just begun. He became the ruling spirit of the next two thousand years. Like the teacher of wisdom in Babylonian legend, Cannes, he rose up from the sea, from the primeval darkness, and brought a world-period to an end. It is true that he said, “I am come not to bring peace but a sword.” But that which brings division ultimately creates union. Therefore his teaching was one of all-uniting love. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 293

Belief is no adequate substitute for inner experience, and where this is absent even a strong faith which came miraculously as a gift of grace may depart equally miraculously. People call faith the true religious experience, but they do not stop to consider that actually it is a secondary phenomenon arising from the fact that something happened to us in the first place which instilled pistis into us—that is, trust and loyalty. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 521

Religion means dependence on and submission to the irrational facts of experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 505

For thousands of years the mind of man has worried about the sick soul, perhaps even earlier than it did about the sick body. The propitiation of gods, the perils of the soul and its salvation, these are not yesterday’s problems. Religions are psychotherapeutic systems in the truest sense of the word, and on the grandest scale. They express the whole range of the psychic problem in mighty images; they are the avowal and recognition of the soul, and at the same time the revelatio of the soul’s nature. From this universal foundation no human soul is cut off; only the individual consciousness that has lost its connection with the psychic totality remains caught in the illusion that the soul is a small circumscribed area, a fit subject for “scientific” theorizing. The loss of this great relationship is the prime evil of neurosis. ~Carl Jung, CW 10 Para 367

The reality of good and evil consists in things and situations that just happen to you, that are too big for you, where you are always facing death. Anything that comes upon me with this intensity I experience as numinous, no matter whether I call it divine or devilish or just “fate.” ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 871

Grounds for an unusually intense fear of death are nowadays not far to seek: they are obvious enough, the more so as all life that is senselessly wasted and misdirected means death too. This may account for the unnatural intensification of the fear of death in our time, when life has lost its deeper meaning for so many people, forcing them to exchange the life-preserving rhythm of the aeons for the dread ticking of the clock. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 696

We distinctly resent the idea of invisible and arbitrary forces, for it is not so long ago that we made our escape from that frightening world of dreams and superstitions, and constructed for ourselves a picture of the cosmos worthy of our rational consciousness—that latest and greatest achievement of man. We are now surrounded by a world that is obedient to rational laws. It is true that we do not know the causes of everything, but in time they will be discovered, and these discoveries will accord with our reasoned expectations. There are, to be sure, also chance occurrences, but they are merely accidental, and we do not doubt that they have a causality of their own. Chance happenings are repellent to the mind that loves order. They disturb the regular, predictable course of events in the most absurd and irritating way. We resent them as much as we resent invisible, arbitrary forces, for they remind us too much of Satanic imps or of the caprice of a deus ex machina. They are the worst enemies of our careful calculations and a continual threat to all our undertakings. Being admittedly contrary to reason, they deserve all our abuse, and yet we should not fail to give them their due. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 113

“The stars of thine own fate lie in thy breast,” says Seni to Wallenstein—a dictum that should satisfy all astrologers if we knew even a little about the secrets of the heart. But for this, so far, men have had little understanding. Nor would I dare to assert that things are any better today. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 9

Whether primitive or not, mankind always stands on the brink of actions it performs itself but does not control. The whole world wants peace and the whole world prepares for war, to take but one example. Mankind is powerless against mankind, and the gods, as ever, show it the ways of fate. Today we call the gods “factors,” which comes from facere, ‘to make.’ The makers stand behind the wings of the world-theatre. It is so in great things as in small. In the realm of consciousness we are our own masters; we seem to be the “factors” themselves. But if we step through the door of the shadow we discover with terror that we are the objects of unseen factors. ~Carl Jung CW 10 Para 49

It is dangerous to avow spiritual poverty, for the poor man has desires, and whoever has desires calls down some fatality on himself. A Swiss proverb puts it drastically: “Behind every rich man stands a devil, and behind every poor man two.” ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 28

In our strength we are independent and isolated, and are masters of our own fate; in our weakness we are dependent and bound, and become unwilling instruments of fate, for here it is not the individual will that counts but the will of the species. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para

Great innovations never come from above; they come invariably from below, just as trees never grow from the sky downward, but upward from the earth. The upheaval of our world and the upheaval of our consciousness are one and the same. Everything has become relative and therefore doubtful. And while man, hesitant and questioning, contemplates a world that is distracted with treaties of peace and pacts of friendship, with democracy and dictatorship, capitalism and Bolshevism, his spirit yearns for an answer that will allay the turmoil of doubt and uncertainty. And it is just the people from the obscurer levels who follow the unconscious drive of the psyche; it is the much-derided, silent folk of the land, who are less infected with academic prejudices than the shining celebrities are wont to be. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 177

The “present” is a thin surface stratum that is laid down in the great centres of civilization. If it is very thin, as in Tsarist Russia, it has no meaning, as events have shown. But once it has attained a certain strength, we can speak of civilization and progress, and then problems arise that are characteristic of an epoch. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 239

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood? ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 266

The time is as great as one thinks it, and man grows to the stature of the time. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 945

The man of the present must work for the future and leave others to conserve the past. He is therefore not only a builder but also a destroyer. He and his world have both become questionable and ambiguous. The ways that the past shows him and the answers it gives to his questions are insufficient for the needs of the present. All the old, comfortable ways are blocked, new paths have been opened up, and new dangers have arisen of which the past knew nothing. It is proverbial that one never learns anything from history, and in regard to present-day problems it usually teaches us nothing. The new path has to be made through untrodden regions, without presuppositions and often, unfortunately, without piety. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 239

Sometimes, when we look back at history, it seems as though the present time had analogies with certain periods in the past, when great empires and civilizations had passed their zenith and were hastening irresistibly towards decay. But these analogies are deceptive, for there are always renaissances. What does move more clearly into the foreground is Europe’s position midway between the Asiatic East and the Anglo-Saxon—or shall we say American?—West. Europe now stands between two colossi, both uncouth in their form but implacably opposed to one another in their nature. They are profoundly different not only racially but in their ideals. In the West there is the maximum political freedom with the minimum personal freedom; in the East it is just the opposite. We see in the West a tremendous development of Europe’s technological and scientific tendencies, and in the Far East an awakening of all those spiritual forces which, in Europe, these tendencies hold in check. The power of the West is material, that of the East ideal. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 237

Western man has no need of more superiority over nature, whether outside or inside. He has both in almost devilish perfection. What he lacks is conscious recognition of his inferiority to the nature around and within him. He must learn that he may not do exactly as he wills. If he does not learn this, his own nature will destroy him. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 870

If you want to learn the greatest lesson India can teach you, wrap yourself in the cloak of your moral superiority, go to the Black Pagoda of Konarak, sit down in the shadow of the mighty ruin that is still covered with the most amazing collection of obscenities, read Murray’s cunning old Handbook^ for India, which tells you how to be properly shocked by this lamentable state of affairs, and how you should go into the temples in the evening, because in the lamplight they look if possible “more (and how beautifully!) wicked”; and then analyse carefully and with the utmost honesty all your reactions, feelings, and thoughts. It will take you quite a while, but in the end, if you have done good work, you will have learned something about yourself, and about the white man in general, which you have probably never heard from anyone else. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 1013

How totally different did the world appear to medieval man! For him the earth was eternally fixed and at rest in the centre of the universe, circled by a sun that solicitously bestowed its warmth. Men were all children of God under the loving care of the Most High, who prepared them for eternal blessedness; and all knew exactly what they should do and how they should conduct themselves in order to rise from a corruptible world to an incorruptible and joyous existence. Such a life no longer seems real to us, even in our dreams. Science has long ago torn this lovely veil to shreds. That age lies as far behind as childhood, when one’s own father was unquestionably the handsomest and strongest man on earth. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 162

Is a thing beautiful because I attribute beauty to it? Or is it the objective beauty of the thing that compels me to acknowledge it? As we know, great minds have wrestled with the problem whether it is the glorious sun that illuminates the world, or the sun-like human eye. Archaic man believes it to be the sun, and civilized man believes it to be the eye—so far, at any rate, as he reflects at all and does not suffer from the disease of the poets. He must de-psychize nature in order to dominate her; and in order to see his world objectively he must take back all his archaic projections. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 135

For the Chinese, “spirit” does not signify order, meaning, and everything that is good on the contrary, it is a fiery and sometimes dangerous power. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 939

I am convinced that a truly scientific attitude in psychology must lead to the conclusion that the dynamic processes o£ the psyche cannot be reduced to this or that concrete instinct—we should merely find ourselves back at the stage of the phlogiston theory. We shall be obliged to take the instincts as constituent parts of the psyche, and then abstract our principle of explanation from their mutual relationship. I have therefore pointed out that we would do well to posit a hypothetical quantity, an “energy,” as a psychological explanatory principle, and to call it “libido” in the classical sense of the word, without harbouring any prejudice with regard to its substantiality. With the help of such a quantity, the psychodynamic processes could be explained in an unobjectionable manner, without that unavoidable distortion which a concrete ground of explanation necessarily entails. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 7

The man who promises everything is sure to fulfil nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para, 413

The judgment of others is not in itself a standard of value, it may be no more than a useful piece of information. The individual has a right, indeed it is his duty, to set up and apply his own standard of value. In the last resort ethics are the concern of the individual. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 912

I am neither spurred on by excessive optimism nor in love with high ideals, but am merely concerned with the fate of the individual human being—that infinitesimal unit on whom a world depends, and in whom, if we read the meaning of the Christian message aright, even God seeks his goal. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 588

We say that it is egoistic or “morbid” to be preoccupied with oneself; one’s own company is the worst, “it makes you melancholy”—such are the glowing testimonials accorded to our human make-up. They are evidently deeply ingrained in our Western minds. Whoever thinks in this way has obviously never asked himself what possible pleasure other people could find in the company of such a miserable coward. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 323

Nothing in us ever remains quite uncontradicted, and consciousness can take up no position which will not call up, somewhere in the dark corners of the psyche, a negation or a compensatory effect, approval or resentment. The “other” in us always seems alien and unacceptable; but if we let ourselves be aggrieved the feeling sinks in, and we are the richer for this little bit of self-knowledge ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 918

Only a fool is interested in other people’s guilt, since he cannot alter it. The wise man learns only from his own guilt. He will ask himself: Who am I that all this should happen to me? To find the answer to this fateful question he will look into his own heart. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 152

We still attribute to the other fellow all the evil and inferior qualities that we do not like to recognize in ourselves, and therefore have to criticize and attack him, when all that has happened is that an inferior “soul” has emigrated from one person to another. The world is still full of betes noires and scapegoats, just as it formerly teemed with witches and werewolves. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 130

It is just the beam in one’s own eye that enables one to detect the mote in one’s brother’s eye. The beam in one’s own eye does not prove that one’s brother has no mote in his. But the impairment of one’s own vision might easily give rise to a general theory that all motes are beams. The recognition and taking to heart of the subjective determination of knowledge in general, and of psychological knowledge in particular, are basic conditions for the scientific and impartial evaluation of a psyche different from that of the observing subject. These conditions are fulfilled only when the observer is sufficiently informed about the nature and scope of his own personality. He can, however, be sufficiently informed only when he has in large measure freed himself from the levelling influence of collective opinions and thereby arrived at a clear conception of his own individuality. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 10

If only people could realize what an enrichment it is to find one’s own guilt, what a sense of honour and spiritual dignity! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 416

To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light. Once one has experienced a few times what it is like to stand judgingly between the opposites, one begins to understand what is meant by the self. Anyone who perceives his shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 872

Only an exceedingly naive and unconscious person could imagine that he is in a position to avoid sin. Psychology can no longer afford childish illusions of this kind; it must ensue the truth and declare that unconsciousness is not only no excuse but is actually one of the most heinous sins. Human law may exempt it from punishment, but Nature avenges herself more mercilessly, for it is nothing to her whether a man is conscious of his sin or not. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 676

Christ the ideal took upon himself the sins of the world. But if the ideal is wholly outside then the sins of the individual are also outside, and consequently he is more of a fragment than ever, since superficial misunderstanding conveniently enables him, quite literally, to “cast his sins upon Christ” and thus to evade his deepest responsibilities—which is contrary to the spirit of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 9

We psychologists have learned, through long and painful experience, that you deprive a man of his best resource when you help him to get rid of his complexes. You can only help him to become sufficiently aware of them and to start a conscious conflict within himself. In this way the complex becomes a focus of life. Anything that disappears from your psychological inventory is apt to turn up in the guise of a hostile neighbour, who will inevitably arouse your anger and make you aggressive. It is surely better to know that your worst enemy is right there in your own heart. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 456

The people who fancy they are sure of themselves are the ones who are truly unsure. Our whole life is unsure, so a feeling of unsureness is much nearer to the truth than the illusion and bluff of sureness. In the long run it is the better adapted man who triumphs, not the wrongly self-confident, who is at the mercy of dangers from without and within. ~Carl Jung, CW 10. Para 18

It seems to be very hard for people to live with riddles or to let them live, although one would think that life is so full of riddles as it is that a few more things we cannot answer would make no difference. But perhaps it is just this that is so unendurable, that there are irrational things in our own psyche which upset the conscious mind in its illusory certainties by confronting it with the riddle of its existence. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 307

The only thing that cannot be improved upon is morality, for every alteration of traditional morality is by definition an immorality. This bon mot has an edge to it, against which many an innovator has barked his shins. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 114

Nothing is so jealous as a truth. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 190

No doubt it is a great nuisance that mankind is not uniform but compounded of individuals whose psychic structure spreads them over a span of at least ten thousand years. Hence there is absolutely no truth that does not spell salvation to one person and damnation to another. All universalisms get stuck in this terrible dilemma, ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 36

For a moral man the ethical problem is a passionate question which has its roots in the deepest instinctual processes as well as in his most idealistic aspirations. The problem for him is devastatingly real. It is not surprising, therefore, that the answer likewise springs from the depths of his nature. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 289

Why do we always forget that there is nothing majestic or beautiful in the wide domain of human culture that did not grow originally from a lucky idea? What would become of mankind if nobody had lucky ideas anymore? It would be far truer to say that our consciousness is a sack which has nothing in it except what chances to fall into it. We never appreciate how dependent we are on lucky ideas—until we find to our distress that they will not come. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 305

The true genius nearly always intrudes and disturbs. He speaks to a temporal world out of a world eternal. He says the wrong things at the right time. Eternal truths are never true at any given moment in history. The process of transformation has to make a halt in order to digest and assimilate the utterly impractical things that the genius has produced from the storehouse of eternity. Yet the genius is the healer of his time, because anything he reveals of eternal truth is healing. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 1004

Nature, as we know, is not so lavish with her boons that she joins to a high intelligence the gifts of the heart also.As a rule, where one is present the other is missing, and where one capacity is present in perfection it is generally at the cost of all the others. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 569

Has it ever—except in the most benighted periods of history—been observed that a scientific truth needed to be elevated to the rank of a dogma? Truth can stand on its own feet, only shaky opinions require the support of dogmatization. Fanaticism is ever the brother of doubt, ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 335

The danger that faces us today is that the whole of reality will be replaced by words. This accounts for that terrible lack of instinct in modern man, particularly the city-dweller. He lacks all contact with life and the breath of nature. He knows a rabbit or a cow only from the illustrated paper, the dictionary, or the movies, and thinks he knows what it is really like—and is then amazed that cowsheds “smell,” because the dictionary didn’t say so. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 882

One o£ the most fundamental characteristics of every civilization is the quality of permanence, something created by man and wrested from the meaningless flux of nature. Every house, every bridge, every street, is a witness to the value of duration in the midst of change. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 923

He who is rooted in the soil endures. Alienation from the unconscious and from its historical conditions spells rootlessness. That is the danger that lies in wait for the conqueror of foreign lands, and for every individual who, through one-sided allegiance to any kind of -ism, loses touch with the dark, maternal, earthy ground of his being. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 103

No one can make history who is not willing to risk everything for it, to carry the experiment with his own life through to the bitter end, and to declare that his life is not a continuation of the past, but a new beginning. Mere continuation can be left to the animals, but inauguration is the prerogative of man, the one thing he can boast of that lifts him above the beasts. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 268

No man can begin with the present; he must slowly grow into it, for there would be no present but for the past. A young person has not yet acquired a past, therefore he has no present either. He does not create culture, he merely exists. It is the privilege and the task of maturer people, who have passed the meridian of life, to create culture. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 272

It is obvious that in handling “big” dreams intuitive guesswork will lead nowhere. Wide knowledge is required, such as a specialist ought to possess. But no dream can be interpreted with knowledge alone. This knowledge, furthermore, should not be dead material that has been memorized; it must possess a living quality, and be infused with the experience of the person who uses it. Of what use is philosophical knowledge in the head, if one is not also a philosopher at heart? ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 324

Most men are erotically blinded—they commit the unpardonable mistake of confusing Eros with sex. A man thinks he possesses a woman if he has her sexually. He never possesses her less, for to a woman the Eros-relationship is the real and decisive one. For her, marriage is a relationship with sex thrown in as an accompaniment. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 255

Traditionally, man is regarded as the marriage breaker. This legend comes from times long past, when men still had leisure to pursue all sorts of pastimes. But today life makes so many demands on men that the noble hidalgo, Don Juan, is to be seen nowhere save in the theatre. More than ever man loves his comfort, for ours is an age of neurasthenia, impotence, and easy chairs. There is no energy left for window-climbing and duels. If anything is to happen in the way of adultery it must not be too difficult. In no respect must it cost too much, hence the adventure can only be of a transitory kind. The man of today is thoroughly scared of jeopardizing marriage as an institution. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 248

Woman nowadays feels that there is no real security in marriage, for what does her husband’s faithfulness mean when she knows that his feelings and thoughts are running after others and that he is merely too calculating or too cowardly to follow them? What does her own faithfulness mean when she knows that she is simply using it to exploit her legal right of possession, and warping her own soul? She has intimations of a higher fidelity to the spirit and to a love beyond human weakness and imperfection. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 270

Do our legislators really know what “adultery” is? Is their definition of it the final embodiment of the tru