The Privilege of a Lifetime Is to Become
Who You Truly Are
The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.
Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people.
A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.
The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.
What you resist, persists.
Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
The healthy man does not torture others — generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.
Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.
Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.
Depression is like a woman in black. If she turns up, don’t shoo her away. Invite her in, offer her a seat, treat her like a guest and listen to what she wants to say.
I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success of money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears.
We cannot change anything unless we accept it.
Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event.
The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.
The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ — all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself — that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness — that I myself am the enemy who must be loved — what then? As a rule, the Christian's attitude is then reversed; there is no longer any question of love or long-suffering; we say to the brother within us "Raca," and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide it from the world; we refuse to admit ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves.
Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next.
Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.
You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.
I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.
Deep down, below the surface of the average man's conscience, he hears a voice whispering, "There is something not right," no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or moral code.
Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.
If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.
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.
The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.
Shame is a soul eating emotion.
I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.
There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. 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.
Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
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.
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.
There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.
The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.
There's no coming to consciousness without pain.
No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.
How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole.
Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries.
Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.
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 objects it loves.
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
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.
A dream is a small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens up to that primeval cosmic night that was the soul, long before there was the conscious ego.
Midlife is the time to let go of an over-dominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.
About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times.
With a truly tragic delusion — these theologians fail to see that it is not a matter of proving the existence of the light, but of blind people who do not know that their eyes could see. It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing.
An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling. 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.
If you are a gifted person, it doesn’t mean that you gained something. It means you have something to give back.
The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.
1 comment:
One unfortunate element of the purported quotatons above is that they are absent and citations.
Some, as an electronic search reveals, were never uttered by Dr. Jung and others are simply paraphrases.
No doubt it takes a "Stronghear" to take the time and effort to ensure accuracy.
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