Quote of the day

Any renewal not deeply rooted in the best spiritual tradition is ephemeral; but the dominant that grows from historical roots acts like a living being within the ego-bound man. He does not possess it, it possesses him; therefore the alchemists said that the artifex is not the master but rather the minister of the stone. CW14 - p. 370

Quote of the day

First we must accept the fact of ourselves, what we are; then we can develop. In accepting ourselves in our embryonic condition we receive ourselves, as a mother receives a child in her womb where it is fed and develops. If we can really accept ourselves, we can feed and develop ourselves; to expect anything else is like expecting a cast-off child to thrive. The Visions Seminars, V. I, p. 204

Quote of the day

Even the enlightened person remains what he is, and 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. CW 11 - p. 470

Quote of the day

We think we can congratulate ourselves on having reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal spectres, not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of gods. We are still as much possessed by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor's consulting room, or disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world. CW 13 - par 54

Quote of the day

The ego stands to the self as the moved to the mover, or as object to subject, because the determining factors which radiate out from the self surround the ego on all sides and are therefore supraordinate to it. The self, like the unconscious, is an a priori existent out of which the ego evolves. CW 11 - par 391

Quote of the day

An ancient adept has said, If the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way. This Chinese saying, unfortunately only too true, stands in sharp contrast to our belief in the right method irrespective of the man who applies it. In reality, everything depends on the man and little or nothing on the method. The method is merely the path, the direction taken by the man. CW 13, par 4

Quote of the day

So far as I can grasp the nature of the collective unconscious, it seems to me like an omnipresent continuum, an unextended Everywhere. That is to say, when something happens here at a point A which touches upon or affects the collective unconscious, it has happened everywhere. Letters, Vol. 1, p. 58

Quote of the day

I am all for walking in two worlds at one since we are gifted with two legs. Letters, Vol.2, par. 459

Quote of the day

It is true that our religion speaks of an immortal soul; but it has very few kind words to say for the human psyche. CW 11 - par 28

Quote of the day

The utterances of the heart--unlike those of the discriminating intellect--always relate to the whole. The heartstrings sing like an Aeolian harp only to the gentle breath of a premonitory mood, which does not drown the song but listens. What the heart hears are the great things that span our whole lives, the experiences which we do nothing to arrange but which we ourselves suffer. CW 18 - par 9

Quote of the day

The old alchemists were nearer to the central truth of the psyche [...] when they strove to deliver the fiery spirit from the alchemical elements, and treated the mystery as though it lay in the dark and silent womb of nature. It was still outside them. The upward thrust of evolving consciousness was bound sooner or later to put an end to the projection, and to restore to the psyche what had been psychic from the beginning. CW 12 - par 562

Quote of the day

If you sum up what people tell you about their experiences , you can formulate it this way: They came to themselves, they could accept themselves, they were able to become reconciled to themselves, and thus were reconciled to adverse circumstances and events. This is almost like what used to be expressed by saying: He has made his peace with God, he has sacrificed his own will, he has submitted himself to the will of God. CW 11 - par 138

Quote of the day

All the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble. They must be so, for they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown. CW 13 - par 18

Quote of the day

One cannot live from anything except what one is. CW 14 - par 310

Quote of the day

Without wishing it, we human beings are placed in situations in which the great "principles" entangle us in something, and God leaves it to us to find a way out. CW 10 - par 869

Quote of the day

Nobody can fall so low unless he has a great depth. If such a thing can happen to a man, it challenges his best and highest on the other side; that is to say, this depth corresponds to a potential height, and the blackest darkness to a hidden light. CW 18.

Quote of the day

Creative life always stands outside convention. That is why, when the mere routine of life predominates in the form of convention and tradition, there is bound to be a destructive outbreak of creative energy. This outbreak is a catastrophe only when it is a mass phenomenon, but never in the individual who consciously submits to these higher powers and serves them with all his strength. CW 17 - par 305

Quote of the day

Our personal psychology is just a thin skin, a ripple on the ocean of collective psychology. The powerful factor, the factor which changes our whole life, which changes the surface of our known world, which makes history, is collective psychology, and collective psychology moves according to laws entirely different from those of our consciousness. CW 18 - par 183

Quote of he day

Rationalism and superstition are complementary. It is a psychological rule that the brighter the light, the blacker the shadow; in other words, the more rationalistic we are in our conscious minds, the more alive becomes the spectral world of the unconscious. CW 18 - par 10

Quote of the day

The organism confronts light with a new structure, the eye, and the psyche confronts the natural process with a symbolic image, which apprehends it in the same way as the eye catches the light. And just as the eye bears witness to the peculiar and spontaneous creative activity of living matter, the primordial image expresses the intrinsic and unconditioned creative power of the psyche. The primordial image is thus a condensation of the living process. CW 6 - par 748f