"Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer.
What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.”
"Archetypes speak the language of high rhetoric, even of bombast."
(_MDR_, Ch. 6)
"Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices."
"On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry" [_CW_ 15: 129]
"At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the plashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons."
(_MDR_, Ch. 8)
". . . we have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots."
(_MDR_, Ch. 8)
"The deeper 'layers' of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat further and further into darkness. . . . they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body's materiality. . . . Hence 'at bottom' the psyche is simply 'world.'"
"The Special Phenomenology of the Child Archetype" [pt. 2] [_Psyche_&_Symbol_]
"The sea is the favorite symbol for the unconscious, the mother of all that lives."
"Special Phenomenology" [pt. 4] [_Psyche & Symbol_]
". . . even the enlightened person . . . is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky."
Answer to Job [_CW_ 11: 758]
"The world of gods and spirits is truly 'nothing but' the collective unconscious inside me."
"On 'The Tibetan Book of the Dead" [_CW_ 11: 857]
"The primordial image, or archetype, is a figure--be it a daemon, a human being, or a process--that constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. . . . In each of these images there is a little piece of human psychology and human fate, a remnant of the joys and sorrows that have been repeated countless times in our ancestral history. . . ."
"On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry" [_CW_ 15: 127]
"A belief proves to me only the phenomenon of belief, not the content of the belief."
". . . Christianity slumbers and has neglected to develop its myth further in the course of the centuries. . . . Our myth has become mute, and gives no answers."
(_MDR_, Ch. 12)
". . . the anima is bipolar and can therefore appear positive one moment and negative the next; now young, now old; now mother, now maiden; now a good fairy, now a witch; now a saint, now a whore."
(_CW_ 9i: 356)
"In some way or other we are part of a single, all-embracing psyche, a single 'greatest man."
"The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man" [_CW_ 10: 175]
". . . the spirit is the life of the body seen from within, and the body the outward manifestation of the life of the spirit - the two being really one."
"The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man" [_CW_ 10: 195])
"You can take away a man's gods, but only to give him others in return."
The_Undiscovered_Self_ [_CW_ 10: 544]
". . . every psychic advance of man arises from the suffering of the soul."
"Psychotherapists or the Clergy" [_CW_ 11: 497]
"When people say I am wise, or a sage, I cannot accept it. A man once dipped a hatful of water from a stream. What did that amount to? I am not that stream. I am at the stream, but I do nothing. Other people are at the same stream, but most of them find they have to do something with it. I do nothing. I never think that I am the one who must see to it that cherries grow on stalks. I stand and behold, admiring what nature can do."
(_MDR_, "Retrospect")
". . . man brings with him at birth the ground-plan of his nature. . . ." (_CW_ 4: 728)
"The important thing is what he [a man] talks about, not whether he agrees with it or not."
(_CW_ 5: 99)
". . . poets . . . create from the very depths of the collective unconscious, voicing aloud what others only dream."
(_CW_ 6: 323)
"Only what is really oneself has the power to heal."
(_CW_ 7: 258)
"What is stirred in us is that faraway background, those immemorial patterns of the human mind, which we have not acquired but have inherited from the dim ages of the past."
("The Structure of the Psyche" [_CW_ 8: 315])
"Just as the body bears the traces of its phylogenetic development, so also does the human mind."
"General Aspects of Dream Psychology" [_CW_ 8: 475])
"There is no consciousness without discrimination of opposites."
(_CW_ 9i: 178)
"How else could it have occurred to man to divide the cosmos, on the analogy of day and night, summer and winter, into a bright day-world and a dark night-world peopled with fabulous monsters, unless he had the prototype of such a division in himself, in the polarity between the conscious and the invisible and unknowable unconscious?"
(_CW_ 9i: 187)
"It is, moreover, only in the state of complete abandonment and loneliness that we experience the helpful powers of our own natures."
"Psychotherapists or the Clergy" [_CW_ 11: 525]
"At such moments ["when an archetypal situation occurs"] we are no longer individuals, but the race. . . ."
"On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry" [_CW_ 15: 128]
"Have the horrors of the World War done nothing to open our eyes, so that we still cannot see that the conscious mind is even more devilish and perverse than the naturalness of the unconscious?"
(_CW_ 16: 327)
"Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman. . . . This image is fundamentally unconscious, an hereditary factor of primordial origin . . . an imprint or 'archetype' of all the ancestral experiences of the female, a deposit, as it were, of all the impressions ever made by woman."
“Marriage as a Psychological Relationship" [_CW_ 17: 338]
"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."
(_MDR_, Ch. 9)
"The longing for light is the longing for consciousness."
(_MDR_, Ch. 9)
"Upon every gift that cometh from the god-sun the devil layeth his curse."
(_MDR_, Appendix V ["Septem Sermones ad Mortuos"])
"A collective problem, if not recognized as such, always appears as a personal problem."
[lost source!]
"A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them."
[lost source!]
"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."
[lost source!]
"Only the wounded physician heals."
[lost source!]
"Sentimentality is the superstructure erected upon brutality."
[lost source!]
