Nothing affects the life of a child so much as the unlived life of its parent.
Only a life lived in a certain spirit is worth living. It is a remarkable fact that a life lived entirely from the ego is dull not only for the person himself but for all concerned.
There was need of a phantastic, indestructible optimism, and one far removed from all sense of reality, in order, for example, to discover in the shameful death of Christ really the highest salvation and the redemption of the world.
Yoga in Mayfair or Fifth Avenue, or in any other place which is on the telephone, is a spiritual fake.
Music is the application of sounds to the canvas of silence.
The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life.
Part of the human Self or Soul is not subject to laws of space and time.
Seldom, or perhaps never, does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain.
Science has destroyed even the refuge of the inner life. What was once a sheltering haven has become a place of terror.
Like the sea itself, the unconscious yields an endless and self-replenishing abundance of creatures, a wealth beyond our fathoming.
The Self then functions as a union of opposites and thus constitutes the most immediate experience of the Divine which it is psychologically possible to imagine.
In all earnestness I asked myself what kind of world I had stumbled into.
It seems as if it is only through an experience of symbolic reality that man, vainly seeking his own “existence” and making a philosophy out of it, can find his way back to a world in which he is no longer a stranger.
I readily admit that I have such a great respect for what happens in the human soul that I would be afraid of disturbing and distorting the silent operation of nature by clumsy interference.
In the products of the unconscious we discover mandala symbols, that is, circular and quaternity figures which express wholeness, and whenever we wish to express wholeness, we employ just such figures.
Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche.
Continuous creation is to be thought of not only as a series of successive acts of creation, but also as the eternal presence of the one creative act.
Water is the commonest symbol for the unconscious.
For the alchemist the one primarily in need of redemption is not man, but the deity who is lost and sleeping in matter.
I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life.