Projection [of our own shadow] makes the whole world a replica of our own unknown face.

Everyone you meet knows something you don't know but need to know. Learn from them.

One is always in the dark about one's own personality. One needs others to get to know oneself.

Fortunately, in her kindness and patience, Nature has never put the fatal question as to the meaning of their lives into the mouths of most people. And where no one asks, no one needs to answer.

It is only through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious. We cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities. Both are border-line concepts for transcendental contents. But empirically it can be established, with a sufficient degree of probability, that there is in the unconscious an archetype of wholeness.

Our mania for rational explanations obviously has its roots in our fear of metaphysics, for the two were always hostile brothers. Hence, anything unexpected that approaches us from the dark realm is regarded either as coming from outside and, therefore, as real, or else as a hallucination and, therefore, not true. The idea that anything could be real or true which does not come from outside has hardly begun to dawn on contemporary man.

We are so full of apprehensions, fears, that we don't know exactly to what it points... a great change of our psychoglogical attitude is imminent, that is certain...because we need more understanding of human nature because ...the only real danger that exists is man himself... and we know nothing of man - his psyche should be studied because we are the origin of all coming evil.

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

Everyone is in love with his own ideas

Man positively needs general ideas and convictions that will give a meaning to his life and enable him to find a place for himself in the universe

Be grateful for your difficulties and challenges, for they hold blessings. In fact... Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health, personal growth, individuation and self-actualisation.

As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single individual who will experience it and carry it through. The change must indeed begin with an individual; it might be any one of us. Nobody can afford to look round and to wait for somebody else to do what he is loath to do himself.

A sense of a wider meaning to one's existence is what raises a man beyond mere getting and spending. If he lacks this sense, he is lost and miserable

When goals go, meaning goes. When meaning goes, purpose goes. When purpose goes, life goes dead on our hands.

The psyche is a natural phenomenon. All aspects of the psyche, even those which seem pathological or destructive, actually serve the function of furthering our psychological development.

It is just man's turning away from instinct--his opposing himself to instinct--that creates consciousness. Instinct is nature and seeks to perpetuate nature; while consciousness can only seek culture or its denial.

Whenever there is a reaching down into innermost experience, into the nucleus of personality, most people are overcome by fear and many run away. . . The risk of inner experience, the adventure of the spirit, is in any case alien to most human beings. The possibility that such experience might have psychic reality is anathema to them.

I have always said to my pupils: "Learn as much as you can about symbolism; then forget it when you are analyzing a dream."

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. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions - not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation or something I do not know.

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.

Imagination is a concentrated extract of all the forces of life.

The serious problems in life...are never fully solved. If ever they should appear to be so it is a sure sign that something has been lost. The meaning and purpose of a problem seem to lie not in its solution but in our working at it incessantly.