An old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as the young man who is unable to embrace it.

A true symbol appears only when there is a need to express what thought cannot think or what is only divined or felt.

Understanding does not cure evil, but it is a definite help, inasmuch as one can cope with a comprehensible darkness.

Science has destroyed even the refuge of the inner life. What was once a sheltering haven has become a place of terror

Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naively suppose that people are as we imagine them to be.

It is not for us . . . to send out missionaries to foreign peoples; it is our task to build up our own Western culture.

A purely psychological explanation is ruled out... the discs show signs of intelligent guidance, by quasi-human pilots.

For the alchemist the one primarily in need of redemption is not man, but the deity who is lost and sleeping in matter.

Our world has become dehumanized. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature.

The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life.

During my medical education at the University of Basle I found vivisection horrible, barbarous and above all unnecessary

Most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us.

It is a moral achievement on the part of the doctor who ought not to let himself be repelled by sickness and corruption.

Becoming conscious is of course a sacrilege against nature; it is as though you had robbed the unconscious of something.

Not nature, but the "genius of mankind," has knotted the hangman's noose with which it can execute itself at any moment.

It is on the whole probably that we continually dream, but that consciousness makes such a noise that we do not hear it.

Doesn't the world bring forth thinking in human heads with the same necessity that it brings forth blossoms on the plant?

The most dangerous things in the world are immense accumulations of human beings who are manipulated by only a few heads.

We know that the wildest and most moving dramas are played not in the theatre but in the hearts of ordinary men and women.

Someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, [is] an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow.

It is a bewildering thing in human life that the things that cause the greatest fear is the source of the greatest wisdom.

Creativity is the art that can give rise to visionary metaphorical relationships, as opposed to purely psy-chological ones.

I have always said to my pupils: "Learn as much as you can about symbolism; then forget it when you are analyzing a dream."

Our intellect has achieved the most tremendous things, but in the meantime our spiritual dwelling has fallen into disrepair.

Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche.

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

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

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.

In the history of the collective as in the history of the individual, everything depends on the development of consciousness.

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.

How difficult it is to reach anything approaching a moderate and relatively calm point of view in the midst of one's emotions.

The mind has grown to its present state of consciousness as an acorn grows into an oak, or as saurians developed into mammals.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

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.

The afternoon of a human life must have a significance of its own, and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life's morning.

The greater the contrast, the greater the potential. Great energy only comes from a correspondingly great tension of opposites.

Synchronicity: A meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved.

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.

Consciousness succumbs all too easily to unconscious influences, and these are often truer and wiser than our conscious thinking.

Psychiatrists classify a person as neurotic if he suffers from his problems in living, and a psychotic if he makes others suffer.

Intuition is perception via the unconscious that brings forth ideas, images, new possibilities and ways out of blocked situations.

Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.

Insight that dawns slowly seems to me to have more lasting effects than a fitful idealism, which is unlikely to hold out for long.

The divine process of change manifests itself to our human understanding . . . as punishment, torment, death, and transfiguration.

How can anyone see straight when he does not see himself and the darkness he unconsciously carries with him into all his dealings?

Real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full.

Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it.

When you are up against a wall, put down roots like a tree, until clarity comes from deeper sources to see over that wall and grow.

Like the sea itself, the unconscious yields an endless and self-replenishing abundance of creatures, a wealth beyond our fathoming.

What happens in the life of Christ happens always and everywhere. In the Christian archetype all lives of this kind are prefigured.

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