Quotes from Carl Jung

Practical experience and accurate observation show that one cannot influence one's own dreams. There are people, it is true, who assert that they can influence them. But if you look into their dream material, you find that they do only what I do with my disobedient dog: I order him to do those things I notice he wants to do anyhow, so that I can preserve my illusion of authority.

Unlived life is a destructive, irresistible force that works softly but inexorably.

Mostly, they are deceptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications which unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever before. Omnis festinatio ex parte diaboli est—all haste is of the devil, as the old masters used to say.

The psyche's attachment to the brain, i.e., its space-time limitation, is no longer as self-evident and incontrovertible as we have hitherto been led to believe. … It is not only permissible to doubt the absolute validity of space-time perception; it is, in view of the available facts, even imperative to do so.

We cannot slay our incapacity and rise above it, but that is precisely what we wanted. Incapacity exists. No one should deny it, find fault with it or shout it down.

You are a slave of what you need in your soul.

It is with you all the time and demands fulfillment. If you pretend to be blind and dumb to this demand, you feign being blind and deaf to yourself This way you will never reach the knowledge of the heart. The knowledge ofyour heart is how your heart is. From a cunning heart you will know cunning. From a good heart you will know goodness. So that your understanding becomes perfect, consider that your heart is both good and evil. You ask, "What? Should I also live evil?

Blind acceptance never leads to a solution; at best it leads only to a standstill and is paid for heavily in the next generation.

Man in the mass sinks unconsciously to an inferior moral and intellectual level, to that level which is always there, below the threshold of consciousness, ready to break forth as soon as it is activated by the formation of a mass. ... Since nobody is capable of recognizing just where and how much he himself is possessed and unconscious, he simply projects his own condition upon his neighbor, and thus it becomes a sacred duty to have the biggest guns and the most poisonous gas.

In this way he slips imperceptibly into a purely conceptual world where the products of his conscious activity progressively take the place of reality.

The forlorn state of consciousness in our world is due primarily to loss of instinct, and the reason for this lies in the development of the human mind over the past aeon. The more power man had over nature, the more his knowledge and skill went to his head, and the deeper became his contempt for the merely natural and accidental, for all irrational data—including the objective psyche, which is everything that consciousness is not.

The image of God has a shadow. The supreme meaning is real and casts a shadow. For what can be actual and corporeal and have no shadows?