Only by discovering alchemy have I clearly understood that the Unconscious is a process and that ego’s rapport with the Unconscious and its contents initiate an evolution, more precisely, a real metamorphosis of the psyche.
In order to know the light, we must first experience the darkness.
Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfill the way that is in you.
Whereas I formerly believed it to be my bounden duty to call other persons to order, I now admit that I need calling to order myself.
One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is.
We can keep from a child all knowledge of earlier myths, but we cannot take from him the need for mythology.
Only the wounded physician heals.
The fact is that certain ideas exist almost everywhere and at all times and can even spontaneously create themselves quite independently of migration and tradition.
My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest. Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light.
Whatever is not conscious will be experienced as fate.
In every adult there lurks a child – an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education. That is the part of the personality which wants to develop and become whole.
If a union is to take place between opposites like spirit and matter, conscious and unconscious, bright and dark, and so on, it will happen in a third thing, which represents not a compromise but something new.
Language, in its origin and essence, is simply a system of signs or symbols that denote real occurrences or their echo in the human soul.
What happens in the life of Christ happens always and everywhere. In the Christian archetype all lives of this kind are prefigured.
The doctor is effective only when he himself is affected. Only the wounded physician heals.
All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes.
The reason for such an “unreasonable” attitude with me is that I am not at all sure what will happen to me after death. I have good reasons to assume that things are not finished with death. Life seems to be an interlude in a long story.
Paul hardly ever allows the real Jesus of Nazareth to get a word in.
New ideas are not only the enemies of old ones; they also appear often in an extremely unacceptable form.
Because the European does not know his own unconscious, he does not understand the East and projects it into everything he fears and despises in himself.