Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.
— Carl Jung
We shall probably get nearest to the truth if we think of the conscious and personal psyche as resting upon the broad basis of an inherited and universal psychic disposition which is as such unconscious, and that our personal psyche bears the same relation to the collective psyche as the individual to society.
In the child, consciousness rises out of the depths of unconscious psychic life, at first like separate islands, which gradually unite to form a 'continent,' a continuous landmass of consciousness. Progressive mental development means, in effect, extension of consciousness.
Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.
There is no birth of consciousness without pain.
The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor naked heathen, but the spiritual heathen who populate Europe have as yet heard nothing of Christianity.
A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.
The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.
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.
All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.
When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.
We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learnt to bear its ills without being overcome by them.
There is no coming to consciousness without pain.
Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.
Our heart glows, and secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. Dealing with the unconscious has become a question of life for us.
Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life's morning.
The collective unconscious consists of the sum of the instincts and their correlates, the archetypes. Just as everybody possesses instincts, so he also possesses a stock of archetypal images.
For a young person, it is almost a sin, or at least a danger, to be too preoccupied with himself; but for the ageing person, it is a duty and a necessity to devote serious attention to himself.
A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.
Everyone knows nowadays that people 'have complexes'. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.
The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid.
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.
If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.
It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.
Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.
Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.
A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.
Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own.
The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.
The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.
A 'scream' is always just that - a noise and not music.
Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.
There is no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert. Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum.
We are in a far better position to observe instincts in animals or in primitives than in ourselves. This is due to the fact that we have grown accustomed to scrutinizing our own actions and to seeking rational explanations for them.
Just as we might take Darwin as an example of the normal extraverted thinking type, the normal introverted thinking type could be represented by Kant. The one speaks with facts, the other relies on the subjective factor. Darwin ranges over the wide field of objective reality, Kant restricts himself to a critique of knowledge.
The Christ-symbol is of the greatest importance for psychology in so far as it is perhaps the most highly developed and differentiated symbol of the self, apart from the figure of the Buddha.
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.
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?
Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.
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.
Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.
Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better.
In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.
We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.
The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
