To be practical, any plan must take account of the enemy’s power to frustrate it.

You can take away a man’s gods, but only to give him others in return

There is in the psyche some superior power, and if it is not consciously a god, it is the belly at least, in St. Paul’s words

The idea of an all-powerful divine Being is present everywhere—unconsciously if not consciously, because it is an archetype

The unconscious wants to flow into consciousness in order to reach the light, but at the same time, it continually thwarts itself because it would rather remain unconscious. That is to say, God wants to become man, but not quite.

Trees, in particular, were mysterious and seemed to me direct embodiments of the incomprehensible meaning of life. For that reason, the woods were the places where I felt closest to its deepest meaning and to its awe-inspiring workings

Plants were bound for good or ill to their places. They expressed not only beauty, but also the thoughts of God’s world, with an intent of their own and without deviation

Here we must ask, ‘Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd?

Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science

This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing

We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a ‘metamorphosis of the gods.

Man can try to name love, showering upon it all the names at his command, and still he will involve himself in endless self deceptions. If he possesses a grain of wisdom, he will lay down his arms and name the unknown by the more unknown—ignotum per ignotius—that is by the name of God.

Called or not, God is always there

The sure path can only lead to death.

The kernel of all jealousy is lack of love

If you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself.

Man cannot stand a meaningless life.

I have always been impressed by the fact that there are a surprising number of individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and an equal number who do use their minds, but in an amazingly stupid way

Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them

When you are up against a wall, put down roots like a tree until clarity comes from deeper sources to see over that wall and grow

Creative power is mightier than its possessor.

When many people gather together to share one common emotion, the total psyche emerging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche

People don’t have ideas. Ideas have people.

For better to come, good must stand aside

Condemnation does not liberate; it oppresses

The fact that a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing. He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths

We are not what happened to us, we are what we wish to become

In each of us there is another whom we do not know.

When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate

What if I should discover that the poorest of the beggars and the most impudent of offenders are all within me; and that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness—that I, myself, am the enemy who must be loved. What then?

Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness. I have no judgment about myself and my life

I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum

Anyone who attempts to do both—to adjust to his group and at the same time pursue his individual goal—becomes neurotic

The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings.

What you resist, persists.

The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others

Through pride, we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience, a still, small voice says to us, ‘Something is out of tune.

You wanted to accept everything, so accept madness too.

The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life

We cannot change anything unless we accept it

As the man is, so will be his ultimate truth

Upon one’s own philosophy—conscious or unconscious—depends one’s ultimate interpretation of facts

We should know what our convictions are, and stand for them

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering

A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon

When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity.”

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome.

Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk

The gods have become our diseases.

The majority of my patients consisted not of believers, but of those who had lost their faith

There are not a few who are called awake by the summons of the voice, whereupon they are at once set apart from the others, feeling themselves confronted with a problem about which the others know nothing

We are born at a given moment, in a given place, and like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season in which we are born

As a human being, he may have moods and a will and personal aims; but as an artist, he is a man in a higher sense. He is a ‘collective man’—one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic forms of mankind.

It is far better to take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.”

Nobody, as long as he moves among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.

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

Words are animals, alive with a will of their own.

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.

The decisive question for man is—is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy

Nights through dreams tell the myths forgotten by the day

The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child

The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego. The second half is going inward and letting go of it

To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly, we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is.

Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself.

Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical

Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you

Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.

Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge

Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.

The wrong we have done, thought, or intended will wreak its vengeance on our souls

Often, the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.

I don’t aspire to be a good man. I aspire to be a whole man

I am no longer alone with myself, and I can only artificially recall the scary and beautiful feeling of solitude. This is the shadow side of the fortune of love

The sight of a child will arouse certain longings in adult, civilized persons—longings which relate to the unfulfilled desires and needs of those parts of the personality which have been blotted out of the total picture in favor of the adapted personal.

One thing you must know—the one thing I have learned is that one must live this life

To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being, he has failed to realize his own life’s meaning

The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization—absolute and unconditional—of its own particular law

The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him

If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s

We no longer live on what we have, but on promises; no longer in the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which we expect will at last bring the proper sunrise

My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.

Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence

Sometimes, you have to do something unforgivable just to be able to go on living

Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance

We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.

We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness

Every human life contains a potential. If that potential is not fulfilled, then that life was wasted

It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going

Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries