Carl Jung

The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness. The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Each of us carries his own life-form—an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other.

Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Without, everything seems discordant; only within does it coalesce into unity. Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes.

Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.

I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole.

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

My soul, my soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you—are you there? I have returned, here I am again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you again, I am with you. After long years of long wandering, I have come to you anew. Shall I tell you everything I have seen, experienced, and drunk in? Or do you not want to hear about all the noise of life and the world? But one thing you must know, the one thing I have learned is that one must live this life. This life is the way, the long sought-after way to the unfathomable, which we call "divine". There is no other way. All other ways are false paths.

Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.

The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.

The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.

Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.