Talk:Carl Jung

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  • What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits.
  • It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.
    • Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 408
  • A shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. See above "Modern Man in Search of a Soul" p. 69
  • All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination?
    • All the works of man have their origin in creative imagination. What right, then, have we to disparage fantasy?
      • Source of the latter quote: The Collected Works of C. G. Jung Vol. 16: The practice of psychotherapy, "The Aims of Psychotherapy," para. 98
  • An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead.
  • Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar's gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart through the world. There, in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul.
    • Source: Collected Works: The psychology of the unconscious and The relations between the ego and the unconscious
  • Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. 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. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is "man" in a higher sense— he is "collective man"— one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic forms of mankind.
    • (Psychology and Literature, 1930)
      • The Collected Works of C. G. Jung: The spirit in man, art, and literature
  • Children are educated by what the grownup is and not by what he says.
    • Collected Works : The archetypes and the collective unconscious
  • Death is psychologically as important as birth... Shrinking away from it is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.
  • 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. It is far better to take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.
  • Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
    • Memories, dreams, reflections (1963)
  • Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own.
  • Great talents are the most lovely and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off.
  • I cannot love anyone if I hate myself. That is the reason why we feel so extremely uncomfortable in the presence of people who are noted for their special virtuousness, for they radiate an atmosphere of the torture they inflict on themselves. That is not a virtue but a vice.
  • I could not say I believe— I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God. (In a film, when asked if he believed that God exists.)
  • I have never encountered a difficulty that was not truly the difficulty of myself.
  • If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance towards oneself can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures.
    • The Collected Works of C. G. Jung: Two essays on analytical psychology
  • If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.
    • The Collected Works : Mysterium coniunctionis, an inquiry into the separation and synthesis of psychic opposites in alchemy
  • In the second half of life the necessity is imposed of recognizing no longer the validity of our former ideals but of their contraries. Of perceiving the error in what was previously our conviction, of sensing the untruth in what was our truth, and of weighing the degree of opposition, and even of hostility, in what we took to be love.
  • In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.
  • India did not pass me by without a trace: it left tracks which lead me from one infinity to another infinity.
  • It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is always worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.
    • The Collected Works of C. G. Jung: The practice of psychotherapy
  • It was most essential for me to have a normal life in the real world as a counterpoise to that strange inner world. My family and my profession remained the base to which I could return...
  • Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
  • Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.
  • Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.
    • The Collected Works of C. G. Jung: The structure and dynamics of psyche
  • Man's task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.
    • "The purpose of existence is to become conscious." -- That was Jung, right?
  • Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.
  • Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.
  • Nothing worse could happen to one than to be completely understood.
  • Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.
  • Our heart glows, and secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. Dealing with the unconscious has become a question of life for us.
  • People cannot stand too much reality.
  • People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul.
    • Psychology and Alchemy – Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 12, pg. 99, 1944, Routledge, London, 2nd edition, 1968
  • Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.
  • Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands. It is part and parcel of our knowledge and obscures our insight only when it holds that the understanding given by it is the only kind there is.
  • Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality.
  • Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
  • Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better.
  • Superstition and accident manifest the will of God.
  • The achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of diminution of personality.
  • The attainment of wholeness requires one to stake one’s whole being. Nothing less will do; there can be no easier conditions, no substitutes, no compromises.
  • The brain is viewed as an appendage of the genital glands. (Comment upon Freudian psychology).
  • The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect, but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object it loves.
    • The Collected Works of C. G. Jung: Psychological types
  • The foundation of all mental illness is the avoidance of true suffering.
  • The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.
  • The healthy man does not torture others — generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.
  • The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life.
  • The man who promises everything is sure to fulfil nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition.
  • The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm which is not easily disturbed, or else a brokenness that can hardly be healed. Conversely, it is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed in order to produce valuable and lasting results.
    • The Collected Works of C. G. Jung: The structure and dynamics of psyche
  • The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.
  • The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
  • The psyche is a self-regulating system that maintains its equilibrium just as the body does. Every process that goes too far immediately and inevitably calls forth compensations, and without these their would be neither a normal metabolism nor a normal psyche. In this sense we can take the theory of compensation as a basic law of psychic behavior. Too little on one side results in too much on the other. Similarly, the relation between conscious and unconscious is compensatory.
  • The word "belief" is a difficult thing for me. I don't believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it— I don't need to believe it.
  • There is no coming to consciousness without pain.
    • Marriage as a Psychological Relationship (1925)
      • Another-meaning variant: "There is no birth of consciousness without pain." -- Is not that one the right way of it being translated, contrary to the "coming to" former variant, it being a quote taken out of context (something to be avoided)?
  • 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.
    • Where is that one coming from? Google Books returns nothing.
  • Understanding does not cure evil, but it is a definite help, inasmuch as one can cope with a comprehensible darkness.
  • 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 of which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything more.
  • We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.
    • Psychology and religion: west and east
  • We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learnt to bear its ills without being overcome by them.
  • We need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself...
  • What is the use of a religion without a mythos, since religion means, if anything, precisely that function which links us back to eternal myth?
  • What youth found and must find outside, the man of life's afternoon must find within himself. Here we face new problems which often cause the doctor no light headache. The transition from morning to afternoon means a revaluation of the earlier values. There comes the urgent need to appreciate the value of the opposite of our former ideals, to perceive the error in our former convictions, to recognize the untruth in our former truth, and to feel how much antagonism and even hatred lay in what, until now, had passed for love.
  • When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.
  • Whenever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator state, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units.
  • You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible to influence.
  • Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart ... Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.
    • Interesting quote; unfortunately, I had to remove the bold due to a literal Google Books search returning nothing relevant.
  • Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.
  • I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.
  • 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
  • You are what you do, not what you say you will do.

Contested quotes[edit]

  • Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious.
    • Collected works state "Emotion is the chief source of consciousness." -- Is not the former quote different in its meaning?
  • No language exists that cannot be misused... Every Interpretation is hypothetical, for it is a mere attempt to read an unfamiliar text.
    • After looking at the context of these two fragments—they are two pages apart—I believe this quote, though technically accurate, is misleading. Here are the two fragments in context:
"It is imperative that we should not pare down the meaning of a dream to fit some narrow doctrine. We must remember that there are not a few patients who imitate the technical or theoretical jargon of the doctor, and do this even in their dreams. No language exists that cannot be misused. It is hard to realize how badly we are fooled by the abuse of ideas, it even seems as if the unconscious had a way of strangling the physician in the coils of his own theory. All this being so, I leave theory aside as much as possible in analysing dreams. We cannot, of course, dispense with theory entirely, for it is needed to make things intelligible. It is on the basis of theory, for instance, that I expect dreams to have a meaning. I cannot prove in every case that dreams are meaningful, for there are dreams that neither doctor nor patient understands. But I must regard them as hypothetically meaningful in order to find courage to deal with them at all. To say that dreams contribute in an important way to conscious knowledge, and that a dream which fails to do so is a dream which has not been properly interpreted—this, too, is a theoretical statement. But I must adopt this hypothesis in order to make it clear to myself why I analyse dreams. On the other hand, every hypothesis about the nature of the dream, its function and structure, is merely a rule of thumb and must be subject to constant modifications. We must never forget in dream-analysis, even for a moment, that we move on treacherous ground where nothing is certain but uncertainty. A suitable warning to the dream-interpreter—if only it were not so paradoxical—would be: 'Do anything you like, only don't try to understand!'" [pp. 11-12]
"Every interpretation is hypothetical, for it is a mere attempt to read an unfamiliar text. An obscure dream, taken by itself, can rarely be interpreted with any certainty, so that I attach little importance to the interpretation of single dreams. With a series of dreams we can have more confidence in our interpretations, for the later dreams correct the mistakes we have made m handling those that went before. We are also better able, in a dream series, to recognize the important contents and basic themes." [p. 14]
I would propose replacing the one misleading quote with two, as follows:
  • It is imperative that we should not pare down the meaning of a dream to fit some narrow doctrine.... No language exists that cannot be misused. It is hard to realize how badly we are fooled by the abuse of ideas, it even seems as if the unconscious had a way of strangling the physician in the coils of his own theory.
  • Every interpretation is hypothetical, for it is a mere attempt to read an unfamiliar text. An obscure dream, taken by itself, can rarely be interpreted with any certainty, so that I attach little importance to the interpretation of single dreams. With a series of dreams we can have more confidence in our interpretations, for the later dreams correct the mistakes we have made m handling those that went before. We are also better able, in a dream series, to recognize the important contents and basic themes.
--Hughh (talk) 18:14, 26 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for your investigation and suggestions. I agreed with your suggestion of adding these two quotes as separate statements, and have now done so, adding a note on the previous form in the comments below the first one. The previous form had been added on 22 November 2007 by an anon IP, and I believe I had previously noted that the range between the 2 statements was somewhat problematic, but had never gotten around to making any specific alterations or suggestions for them, and had been too busy lately to have even noticed or remembered the gap in the sources when I selected it for a QOTD for 26 July 2017.
I have not had time to seek any sources for the various translations which might used for the first suggestion, and must be leaving now, but I certainly welcome the inclusion of any variants in published translations. ~ Kalki·· 01:11, 27 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Smile[edit]

"Everyone can affort to give away a smile." ... attributed to Jung?--LS9974 (talk) 08:22, 28 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

sourced but unorganized[edit]

I removed these quotes, primarily involving death, as an entire section, which was DUMPED as an unorganized mass into the top of the page earlier this year; many can gradually be worked back into the page with proper formatting and organization. ~ ♌︎Kalki ⚓︎ 16:11, 25 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

—Life is never so beautiful as when surrounded by death. ~Carl Jung, Seminar 1925, Page 85

I try to accept life and death. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 546-547

Where I find myself unwilling to accept the one or the other [Life or Death] I should question myself as to my personal motives. . . . ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 546-547

Is it the divine will? Or is it the wish of the human heart which shrinks from the Void of death? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 546-547

In ultimate situations of life and death complete understanding and insight are of paramount importance, as it is indispensable for our decision to go or to stay and let go or to let stay. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 546-547

One needs death to be able to harvest the fruit. Without death, life would be meaningess, since the long-lasting rises again and denies its own meaning. To be, and to enjoy your being, you need death, and limitation enables you to fulfill your being. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 275.

If I accept death, then my tree greens, since dying increases life. If I plunge into the death encompassing the world, then my buds break open. How much our life needs death! ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 275.

We need the coldness of death to see clearly. Life wants to live and to die, to begin and to end. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 275.

The moon is dead. Your soul went to the moon, to the preserver of souls. Thus the soul moved toward death. I went into the inner death and saw that outer dying is better than inner death. And I decided to die outside and to live within. For that reason I turned away and sought the place of the inner life. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 267.

Joy at the smallest things comes to you only when you have accepted death. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 275.

We cannot slay death, as we have already taken all life from it. If we still want to overcome death, then we must enliven it. Therefore on your journey be sure to take golden cups full of the sweet drink of life, red wine, and give it to dead matter, so that it can win life back. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Liber Primus; Page 244.

You must be in the middle of life, surrounded by death on all sides. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 370.

If I am bound to men and things, I can neither go on with my life to its destination nor can I arrive at my very own and deepest nature. Nor can death begin in me as a new life, since I can only fear death. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 356.

I saw how we live toward death, how the swaying golden wheat sinks together under the scythe of the reaper, / like a smooth wave on the sea-beach. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 268.

You may call me death—death that rose with the sun. I come with quiet pain and long peace. I lay the cover of protection on you. In the midst of life begins death. I lay cover upon cover upon you so that your warmth will never cease. ~A Dark Form to Philemon, Liber Novus, Page 355.

In this bloody battle death steps up to you, just like today where mass killing and dying: fill the world. The coldness of death penetrates you. When I froze to death in my solitude, I saw dearly and saw what was to come, as clearly as I could see the stars and the distant mountains on a frosty night. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 274, Footnote 73.

Since what takes place in the secret hour of life's midday is the reversal of the parabola, the birth of death …Not wanting to live is identical with not wanting to die. Becoming and passing away is the same curve. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 274, Footnote 75.

After death on the cross Christ went into the underworld and became Hell. So he took on the form of the Antichrist, the dragon. The image of the Antichrist, which has come down to us from the ancients, announces the new God, whose coming the ancients had foreseen. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 242.

Therefore after his death Christ had to journey to Hell, otherwise the ascent to Heaven would have become impossible for him. Christ first had to become his Antichrist, his under worldly brother. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.

I saw a terrible flood that covered all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. It reached from England up to Russia, and from the coast of the North Sea right up to the Alps. I saw yellow waves, swimming rubble, and the death of countless thousands. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 231.

Look back at the collapse of empires, of growth and death, of the desert and monasteries, they are the images of what is to come. Everything has been foretold. But who knows how to interpret it? ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 236.

But above all protect me from the serpent of judgment, which only appears to be a healing serpent, yet in your depths is infernal poison and agonizing death. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 238.

The spirit of the depths is pregnant with ice, fire, and death. You are right to fear the spirit of the depths, as he is full of horror. You see in these days what the spirit of the depths bore. You did not believe it, but you would have known it if you had taken counsel with your fear. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 238.

The black beetle is the death that is necessary for renewal; and so thereafter, a new sun glowed, the sun of the depths, full of riddles, a sun of the night. And as the rising sun of spring quickens the dead earth, so the sun of the depths quickened the dead, and thus began the terrible struggle between light and darkness. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 238.

I went through a torment unto death and I felt certain that I must kill myself if I could not solve the riddle of the murder of the hero. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 242.

The three days descent into Hell during death describes the sinking of the vanished value into the unconscious, where, by conquering the power of darkness, it establishes a new order, and then rises up to heaven again, that is, attains supreme clarity of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Footnote 135, Page 243.

That is the ambiguity of the God: he is born from a dark ambiguity and rises to a bright ambiguity. Unequivocalness is simplicity and leads to death. But ambiguity is the way of life. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.

I saw it, I know that this is the way: I saw the death of Christ and I saw his lament; I felt the agony of his dying, of the great dying. I saw a new God, a child, who subdued daimons in his hand. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 254.

You're stubborn. What I mean is that it's hardly a coincidence that the whole world has become Christian. I also believe that it was the task of Western man to carry Christ in his heart and to grow with his suffering, death, and resurrection. ~Carl Jung to The Red One, Liber Novus, Page 260.

Death is the hardest thing from the outside and as long as we are outside of it. But once inside you taste of such completeness and peace and fulfillment that you don't want to return. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Pages 355-357.

It frequently happens that when a person with whom one was intimate dies, either one is oneself drawn into the death, so to speak, or else this burden has the opposite effect of a task that has to be fulfilled in real life. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Page 239.

Psychology is a preparation for death. We have an urge to leave life at a higher level than the one at which we entered. ~Carl Jung; Conversations with C.G. Jung, Psychotherapy, Page 16.

Even though spirit is regarded as essentially alive and enlivening, one cannot really feel nature as unspiritual and dead. We must therefore be dealing here with the (Christian) postulate of a spirit whose life is so vastly superior to the life of nature that in comparison with it the latter is no better than death. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i; Para 390.

To put it in modern language, spirit is the dynamic principle, forming for that very reason the classical antithesis of matter—the antithesis, that is, of its stasis and inertia. Basically it is the contrast between life and death. The subsequent differentiation of this contrast leads to the actually very remarkable opposition of spirit and nature. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i; Para 390.

While the man who despairs marches towards nothingness, the one who has placed his faith in the archetype follows the tracks of life and lives right into his death. Both, to be sure, remain in uncertainty, but the one lives against his instincts, the other with them. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 306.

The earthly fate of the Church as the body of Christ is modelled on the earthly fate of Christ himself. That is to say the Church, in the course of her history, moves towards a death. ~Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, par. 28, note 194.

Moreover, the unconscious has a different relation to death than we ourselves have. For example, it is very surprising in which way dreams anticipate death. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 343.

The division into four is a principium individuationis; it means to become one or a whole in the face of the many figures that carry the danger of destruction in them. It is what overcomes death and can bring about rebirth. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 372.

Only for outsiders, who have never been inside, is penal servitude not a hellish cruelty. I know many cases from my psychiatric experience where death would have been a mercy in comparison with life in a prison. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 446-448.

Oh outstanding vessel of devotion and obedience! To the ancestral spirits of my most beloved and faithful wife Emma Maria. She completed her life and after her death she was lamented. She went over to the secret of eternity in the year 1955. Her age was 73. Her husband C.G. .Jung has made and placed [this stone] in 1956.

A point exists at about the thirty-fifth year when things begin to change; it is the first moment of the shadow side of life, of the going down to death. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 223.

The ego is an illusion which ends with death but the karma remains, it is given another ego in the next existence. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. 3, Page 17.

A child, too, enters into this sublimity, and there detaches himself from this world and his manifold individuations more quickly than the aged. So easily does he become what you also are that he apparently vanishes. Sooner or later all the dead become what we also are. But in this reality we know little or nothing about that mode of being, and what shall we still know of this earth after death? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 343.

… it would seem to be more in accord with the collective psyche of humanity to regard death as the fulfillment of life’s meaning and as its goal in the truest sense, instead of a mere meaningless cessation. Anyone who cherishes a rationalistic opinion on this score has isolated himself psychologically and stands opposed to his own basic nature. ~Carl Jung, CWs, 8, ¶807.

Death is psychologically as important as birth, and like it, is an integral part of life. ... As a doctor, I make every effort to strengthen the belief in immortality, especially with older patients when such questions come threateningly close. For, seen in correct psychological perspective, death is not an end but a goal, and life’s inclination towards death begins as soon as the meridian is passed. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para. 68. The analysis of older people provides a wealth of dream symbols that psychically prepare the dreams for impending death. It is in fact true, as Jung has emphasized, that the unconscious psyche pays very little attention to the abrupt end of bodily life and behaves as if the psychic life of the individual, that is, the individuation process, will simply continue. … The unconscious “believes” quite obviously in a life after death. ~Marie-Louise von Franz (1987), ix.

Life's cessation, that is, death, can only be accepted as a reasonable goal either when existence is so wretched that we are only too glad for it to end, or when we are convinced that the sun strives to its setting "to illuminate distant races" with the same logical consistency it showed in rising to the zenith. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Pages 399-403.

As a doctor I am convinced that it is hygienic—if I may use the word—to discover in death a goal towards which one can strive, and that shrinking away from it is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Pages 399-403.

Such a thing is possible only when there is a detachment of the soul from the body. When that takes place and the patient lives on, one can almost with certainty expect a certain deterioration of the character inasmuch as the superior and most essential part of the soul has already left. Such an experience denotes a partial death. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 435-437.

Thus hun [Animus] means 'cloud-demon,' a higher 'breath-soul' belonging to the yang principle and therefore masculine. After death, hun rises upward and becomes shen, the 'expanding and self-revealing' spirit or god. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 114.

'Anima', called p'o, and written with the characters for 'white' and for 'demon', that is, 'white ghost', belongs to the lower, earth-bound, bodily soul, the yin principle, and is therefore feminine. After death, it sinks downward and becomes kuei (demon), often explained as the 'one who returns' (i.e. to earth), a revenant, a ghost. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 114.

The fact that the animus and the anima part after death and go their ways independently shows that, for the Chinese consciousness, they are distinguishable psychic factors which have markedly different effects, and, despite the fact that originally they are united in 'the one effective, true human nature', in the 'house of the Creative,' they are two. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 114.

Hun [Animus], then, would be the discriminating light of consciousness and of reason in man, originally coming from the logos spermatikos of hsing, and returning after death through shen to the Tao. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 116.

The creation and birth of this superior personality is what is meant by our text when it speaks of the 'holy fruit', the 'diamond body', or refers in other ways to an indestructible body. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 123.

To the psyche death is just as important as birth and, like it, is an integral part of life. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 124.

If viewed correctly in the psychological sense, death is not an end but a goal, and therefore life towards death begins as soon as the meridian is passed. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 124.

The Chinese philosophy of yoga is based upon the fact of this instinctive preparation for death as a goal, and, following the analogy with the goal of the first half of life, namely, begetting and reproduction, the means towards perpetuation of physical life, it takes as the purpose of spiritual existence the symbolic begetting and bringing to birth of a psychic spirit body ('subtle body'), which ensures the continuity of the detached consciousness. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 124.

The ego withdraws from its entanglement in the world, and after death remains alive because "interiorization" has prevented the wasting of the life-forces in the outer world. Instead of these being dissipated, they have made within the inner rotation of monad a centre of life which is independent of bodily existence. Such an ego is a god, deus, shen. ~Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 17.

He [Neitzche] expressed it as “God is dead” and he did not realise that in saying this he was still standing within the dogma, for Christ's death is one of the secret mysteries of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 197.

While we are in avidya, we act like automatons, we have no idea what we are doing. Buddha regarded this as absolutely unethical. Avidya acts in the sense of the concupiscentia and involves us in suffering, illness and death. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI, 3Feb1939, Page 74.

After my wife's death. . . I felt an inner obligation to become what I myself am. To put it in the language of the Bollingen house, I suddenly realized that the small central section which crouched so low, so hidden was myself! ~Carl Jung, MDR, Page 225.

Now I know the truth but there is a small piece not filled in and when I know that I shall be dead. ~Carl Jung [2 days before his death] ~Miguel Serrano, Two Friendships, Page 104.

The past decade dealt me heavy blows – the death of dear friends and the even more painful loss of my wife, the end of my scientific activity and the burdens of old age, but also all sorts of honors and above all your friendship, which I value the more highly because it appears that men cannot stand me in the long run. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 516.

Death is a drawing together of two worlds, not an end. We are the bridge. ~Carl Jung, J.E.T., Page 95.

Often people come for analysis who wish to be prepared to meet death. They can make astonishingly good progress in a short time and then die peacefully. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page16.

Christ’s redemptive death on the cross was understood as a “baptism,” that is to say, as rebirth through the second mother, symbolized by the tree of death… The dual-mother motif suggests the idea of a dual birth. One of the mothers is the real, human mother, the other is the symbolical mother. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, para 494-495.

Although there is no way to marshal valid proof of continuance of the soul after death, there are nevertheless experiences which make us thoughtful. I take them as hints, and do not presume to ascribe to them the significance of insights. ~Carl Jung, MDR, Page 312.

I was particularly interested in the dream which, in mid-August 1955, anticipated the death of my wife. It probably expresses the idea of life's perfection: the epitome of all fruits, rounded into a bullet, struck her like karma. C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 310.

In the initiation of the living, however, this "Beyond" is not a world beyond death, but a reversal of the mind's intentions and outlook, a psychological "Beyond" or, in Christian terms, a "redemption" from the trammels of the world and of sin. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Paragraph 813.

I can answer your question about life after death just as well by letter as by word of mouth. Actually this question exceeds the capacity of the human mind, which cannot assert anything beyond itself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 561.

The imminence of death and the vision of the world in conspectu mortis is in truth a curious experience: the sense of the present stretches out beyond today, looking back into centuries gone by, and forward into futures yet unborn. ~Carl Jung, Letters, Vol. II, Page 10.

I'm inclined to believe that something of the human soul remains after death, since already in this conscious life we have evidence that the psyche exists in a relative space and in a relative time, that is in a relatively non-extended and eternal state. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 29-30.

There is no loneliness, but all-ness or infinitely increasing completeness. Such dreams occur at the gateway of death. They interpret the mystery of death. They don't predict it but they show you the right way to approach the end. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 145-146

What I mean by this is that every epoch of our biological life has a numinous character: birth, puberty, marriage, illness, death, etc. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 208-210.

It was the tragedy of my youth to see my father cracking up before my eyes on the problem of his faith and dying an early death. This was the objective outer event that opened my eyes to the importance of religion. Subjective inner experiences prevented me from drawing negative conclusions about religion from my father's fate, much as I was tempted to do so. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.

With no human consciousness to reflect themselves in, good and evil simply happen, or rather, there is no good and evil, but only a sequence of neutral events, or what the Buddhists call the Nidhanachain, the uninterrupted causal concatenation leading to suffering, old age, sickness, and death. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 310-311.

We ought to remember that the Fathers of the Church have insisted upon the fact that God has given Himself to man's death on the Cross so that we may become gods. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 312-316.

Mama's death has left a gap for me that cannot be filled. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 316-317.

Yahweh gives life and death. Christ gives life, even eternal life and no death. He is a definite improvement on Yahweh. He owes this to the fact that He is suffering man as well as God. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 471-473

When one has looked and laboured for a long time, one knows oneself and has grown old. - The "secret of life" is my life, which is enacted round about me, my life and my death; for when the vine has grown old it is torn up by the roots. All the tendrils that would not bear grapes are pruned away. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 514-515

The "secret of life" is my life, which is enacted round about me, my life and my death; for when the vine has grown old it is torn up by the roots . All the tendrils that would not bear grapes are pruned away. Its life is remorselessly cut down to its essence, and the sweetness of the grape is turned into wine, dry and heady, a son of the earth who serves his blood to the multitude and causes the drunkenness which unites the divided and brings back the memory of possessing all and of the kingship, a time of loosening, and a time of peace. There is much more to follow, but it can no longer be told. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 514-515

It looks as if only those who are relatively close to death are serious or mature enough to grasp some of the essentials in our psychology, as a man who wants to get over an obstacle grasps a handy ladder. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 536-537

I try to accept life and death. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 546-547

Where I find myself unwilling to accept the one or the other [Life or Death] I should question myself as to my personal motives. . . . ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 546-547

Is it the divine will? Or is it the wish of the human heart which shrinks from the Void of death? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 546-547

In ultimate situations of life and death complete understanding and insight are of paramount importance, as it is indispensable for our decision to go or to stay and let go or to let stay. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 546-547

As I have so earnestly shared in his [Victor White] life and inner development, his death has become another tragic experience for me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 563

We still consider his [Socrates] daimonion as an individual peculiarity if not worse. Such people, says Buddha, "after their death reach the wrong way, the bad track, down to the depth, into an infernal world." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 531-533

We have to learn with effort the negations of our positions, and to grasp the fact that life is a process that takes place between two poles, being only complete when surrounded by death. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 86

If we became aware of the ancestral lives in us, we might disintegrate. An ancestor might take possession of us and ride us to death. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 139

How great the importance of psychic hygiene, how great the danger of psychic sickness, is evident from the fact that just as all sickness is a watered-down death, neurosis is nothing less than a watered-down suicide, which left to run its malignant course all too often leads to a lethal end. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 38-46

Death is more enduring of all things, that which can never be cancelled out. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 323

Death gives me durability and solidity. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 323.

But many people are never quite born; they live in the flesh but a part of them is still in what Lamaistic philosophy would call the Bardo, in the life between death and birth, and that prenatal state is filled with extraordinary visions. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 424.

If the old were not ripe for death, nothing new would appear; and if the old were not injuriously blocking the way for the new; it could not and need not be rooted out. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 446.

Death is a drawing together of two worlds, not an end. We are the bridge. ~Carl Jung, J.E.T., Page 95.

One needs death to be able to harvest the fruit. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 275.

I have frequently been able to trace back for over a year, in a dream-series, the indications of approaching death, even in cases where such thoughts were not prompted by the outward situation. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 809

Death, therefore, has its onset long before death. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 809

We are so convinced that death is simply the end of a process that it does not ordinarily occur to us to conceive of death as a goal and a fulfilment, as we do without hesitation the aims and purposes of youthful life in its ascendance. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 797

For when the soul vanished at death, it was not lost; in that other world it formed the living counterpole to the state of death in this world. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 493

For when the soul vanished at death, it was not lost; in that other world it formed the living counterpole to the state of death in this world. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 493

We can therefore understand why the nuptiae chymicae, the royal marriage, occupies such an important place in alchemy as a symbol of the supreme and ultimate union, since it represents the magic-by-analogy which is supposed to bring the work to its final consummation and bind the opposites by love, for “love is stronger than death.” ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 398

But when we penetrate the depths of the soul and when we try to understand its mysterious life, we shall discern that death is not a meaningless end, the mere vanishing into nothingness—it is an accomplishment, a ripe fruit on the tree of life. Nor is death an abrupt extinction, but a goal that has been unconsciously lived and worked for during half a lifetime. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1705-7