Quotes from Carl Jung

A dream that is not understood remains a mere occurrence; understood it becomes a living experience.

To the superficial observer, it will appear like madness.

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.

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.

Any theory based on experience is necessarily statistical; that is to say, it formulates an ideal average which abolishes all exceptions at either end of the scale and replaces them by an abstract mean.

From the unconscious there emanate determining influences…which, independently of tradition, guarantee in every single individual a similarity and even a sameness of experience, and also of the way it is represented imaginatively.

One should never think that man can reach perfection, he can only aim at completion — not to be perfect but to be complete. That would be the necessity and the indispensable condition if there were any question of perfection at all. For how can you perfect a thing if it is not complete?

This is certainly not to say that what we call the unconscious is identical with God or is set up in his place. It is simply the medium from which religious experience seems to flow. As to what the further cause of such experience may be, the answer to this lies beyond the range of human knowledge. Knowledge of God is a transcendental problem.

But it is quite understandable that even the best of people are accessible to the idea of a state because, as I said, a state functions as something very real. You see, when the state claims to be like God's finger creating order out of chaos, it is true to a certain extend; it is monstrous, not human, but a people in its wholeness is not human. It is a big animal, and therefore it needs another monster to tame it.

What occurs between the lover and the beloved is the entire fullness of the Godhead. .. the God is born in solitude, from the secret mystery of the individual. The separation between life and love is the contradiction between solitude and togetherness.

A psycho-neurosis must be understood as the suffering of a human being who has not yet discovered what life means for him

The lack of meaning in life is a soul-sickness whose full extent and import our age has not yet begun to comprehend.