16

On Life

The years when I was pursuing my inner images were the most important in my life—in them everything essential was decided. It all began then; the later details are only supplements and clarifications of the material that burst forth from the unconscious, and at first swamped me. It was the prima materia [original matter] for a life’s work.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), p. 199.

“My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you—are you there? I have returned, I am here again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you, I am with you. After long years of long wandering, I have come to you again. Should 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.

“The 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. I found the right way, it led me to you, to my soul. I return, tempered and purified. Do you still know me? How long the separation lasted! Everything has become so different. And how did I find you? How strange my journey was! What words shall I use to tell you on what twisted paths a good star has guided me to you? Give me your hand, my almost forgotten soul. How warm the joy at seeing you again, you long disavowed soul. Life has led me back to you. Let us thank the life I have lived for all the happy and all the sad hours, for every joy, for every sadness. My soul, my journey should continue with you. I will wander with you and ascend to my solitude.”

The Red Book (1915/2009), p. 232.

There is no morality, no moral decision, without freedom. There is only morality when you can choose, and you cannot chose if you are forced.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, Vol. I (21 November 1934), p. 262.

For what is more precious than life to a living creature? If one lives only a half or a third of life, what is the use of living? Life only has meaning when it is really lived. Otherwise it is like a pear tree that blossoms every spring and never brings forth a pear; you remember Christ himself condemned that which bears no fruit, when he cursed the barren fig tree. People who live sterile lives are like that fig tree, they do not fulfill the will of the Lord. If they want to live, they must live with the whole of their being.

Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934, Vol. I (18 February 1931), p. 232.

The utterances of the heart—unlike those of the discriminating intellect—always relate to the whole. The heartstrings sing like an Aeolian harp only under the gentle breath of a mood, an intuition, which does not drown the song but listens. What the heart hears are the great, all-embracing things of life, the experiences which we do not arrange ourselves but which happen to us.

“On the Tale of the Otter” (1932), CW 18, § 1719.

Man needs difficulties, they are necessary for health.

“The Transcendent Function” ([1916]/1958), CW 8, § 143.

Everything psychic is pregnant with the future.

Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955–56), CW 14, § 53.

There are plenty of people who are not yet born. They all seem to be here, they walk about—but as a matter of fact, they are not yet born, because they are behind a glass wall, they are in the womb. They are in the world only on parole and are soon to be returned to the pleroma [fullness] where they started originally. They have not formed a connection with this world; they are suspended in the air; they are neurotic, living the provisional life.

The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1932, p. 28.

In psychology one possesses nothing unless one has experienced it in reality. Hence a purely intellectual insight is not enough, because one knows only the words and not the substance of the thing from inside.

Aion (1951), CW 9ii, § 61.

The word created the world and came before the world. It lit up like a light in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. And thus the word should become what the darkness can comprehend, since what use is the light if the darkness does not comprehend it? But your darkness should grasp the light.

The Red Book (1915/2009), p. 270.

Nobody touches the unconscious without leaving something of himself there. You may forget or repress it, but then you are no longer whole. When you have learned that two times two makes four, it will be so in all eternity—it will never be five.

The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1932 (26 October, 1932), p. 58.

We must do what Christ did. We must make mistakes. We must live out our own vision of life. And there will be no error. If you avoid error you do not live; in a sense even it may be said that every life is a mistake, for no one has found the truth. When we live like this we know Christ as a brother, and God indeed becomes man. This sounds like a terrible blasphemy, but not so. For then only can we understand Christ as he would want to be understood, as a fellow man; then only does God become man in ourselves.

“Is Analytical Psychology a Religion?” (1937), C. G. Jung Speaking, p. 98.

Only what is really oneself has the power to heal.

The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious (1928), CW 7, § 258.

Out of the unconscious flows the well of life, and what you don’t accept in yourself naturally falls back into that well and poisons it; when you don’t recognize certain facts, they form a layer in the unconscious through which the water of life must come up, and it will be poisoned by all those things you have left down below. If they are accepted in your conscious life, then they are mixed with other more valuable and cleaner substances, and the odious qualities of the lower functions disappear more or less. They only form little shadows here and there, sort of spice for the good things. But by excluding them, you cause them to heap up and they become entirely evil substances; for a thing to become poisonous, you only need to repress it.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, Vol. II (12 May 1937), p. 1058.

[I]t is most important that you should be born; you ought to come into this world—otherwise you cannot realize the self, and the purpose of this world has been missed. Then you must simply be thrown back into the melting pot and be born again.

The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1932 (19 October, 1932), pp. 28–29.

What sets one man free is another man’s prison.

The Tavistock Lectures: On the Theory and Practice of Analytical Psychology (1935), CW 18, § 163.

Tears, sorrow, and disappointment are bitter, but wisdom is the comforter in all psychic suffering.

Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955–56), CW 14, § 330.

For me life was something that had to be lived and not talked about.

Letter to Kurt Wolff, 17 June 1958, Letters, Vol. II, p. 452.

[W]isdom begins only when one takes things as they are; otherwise we get nowhere, we simply become inflated balloons with no feet on the earth. So it is a healing attitude when one can agree with the facts as they are; only then can we live in our body on this earth, only then can we thrive.

Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934, Vol. I (27 January 1932), p. 545.

No field could thrive if we assumed that the oats we sowed were wheat, nor could our dog thrive if we took it to be a camel, and so it is unfair to our friends and unfair to ourselves to assume that we can be supermen.

Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934, Vol. I (27 January 1932), p. 545.

When you come to that loneliness with yourself—when you are eternally alone—you are forced in upon yourself and are bound to become aware of your background. And the more there is of the personal unconscious, the more the collective unconscious forces itself upon you. If the personal unconscious is cleared up, there is no particular pressure, and you will not be terrorized; you stay alone, read, walk, smoke, and nothing happens, all is “just so,” you are right with the world.

Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928–1930 (12 December 1928), p. 75.

At Bollingen, I am in the midst of my true life, I am most deeply myself.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), p. 225.

Knowledge of processes in the background early shaped my relationship to the world. Basically, that relationship was the same in my childhood as it is to this day. As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. The loneliness began with the experiences of my early dreams, and reached its climax at the time I was working on the unconscious. If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely. But loneliness is not necessarily inimical to companionship, for no one is more sensitive to companionship than the lonely man, and companionship thrives only when each individual remembers his individuality and does not identify himself with others.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), p. 356.

Whether his fate comes to him from without or from within, the experiences and happenings on the way remain the same.

“Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower” (1929), CW 13, § 26.

Just where we don’t expect life, there it will be, because the life that we know is almost exhausted. The new life always comes from an unexpected corner.

Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934, Vol. I (27 May 1931), p. 377.

A man likes to believe that he is master of his soul. But as long as he is unable to control his moods and emotions, or to be conscious of the myriad secret ways in which unconscious factors insinuate themselves into his arrangements and decisions, he is certainly not his own master. These unconscious factors owe their existence to the autonomy of the archetypes. Modern man protects himself against seeing his own split state by a system of compartments. Certain areas of outer life and of his own behaviour are kept, as it were, in separate drawers and are never confronted with one another.

“Approaching the Unconscious” (1966), Man and His Symbols, p. 83.

How often in the critical moments of life everything hangs on what appears to be a mere nothing!

“The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales” (1945/1948), CW 9i, § 408.

It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. A man who has never experienced that has missed something important. He must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), p. 356.

Doubt is the crown of life because truth and error come together. Doubt is living, truth is sometimes death and stagnation. When you are in doubt you have the greatest opportunity to unite the dark and light sides of life.

Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928–1930 (23 January 1929), p. 89.

A civilization does not decay, it regenerates.

“The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man” (1933/1934), CW 10, § 299.

[I]t seems as if all the personal entanglements and dramatic changes of fortune that make up the intensity of life were nothing but hesitations, timid shrinking, almost like petty complications and meticulous excuses for not facing the finality of this strange and uncanny process of crystallization. Often one has the impression that the personal psyche is running around this central point like a shy animal, at once fascinated and frightened, always in flight, and yet steadily drawing nearer.

Psychology and Alchemy (1944), CW 12, § 326.

So long as he knows that he is the carrier of life and that it is therefore important for him to live, then the mystery of his soul lives also—no matter whether he is conscious of it or not. But if he no longer sees the meaning of his life in its fulfilment, and no longer believes in man’s eternal right to this fulfilment, then he has betrayed and lost his soul, substituting for it a madness which leads to destruction, as our time demonstrates all too clearly.

Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955–56), CW 14, § 201.

I am an orphan, alone; nevertheless I am found everywhere. I am one, but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), p. 227.

I was driven to ask myself in all seriousness: “What is the myth you are living?” I found no answer to this question, and had to admit that I was not living with a myth, or even in a myth, but rather in an uncertain cloud of theoretical possibilities which I was beginning to regard with increasing distrust. I did not know that I was living a myth, and even if I had known it, I would not have known what sort of myth was ordering my life without my knowledge. So, in the most natural way, I took it upon myself to get to know “my” myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks, for—so I told myself—how could I, when treating my patients, make due allowance for the personal factor, for my personal equation, which is yet so necessary for a knowledge of the other person, if I was unconscious of it? I simply had to know what unconscious or preconscious myth was forming me, from what rhizome I sprang. This resolve led me to devote many years of my life to investigating the subjective contents which are the products of unconscious processes, and to work out methods which would enable us, or at any rate help us, to explore the manifestations of the unconscious.

Symbols of Transformation (1912/1952), CW 5, pp. xxiv–xxv.

What had led me astray during the crisis was my passion for being alone, my delight in solitude. Nature seemed to me full of wonders, and I wanted to steep myself in them. Every stone, every plant, every single thing seemed alive and indescribably marvellous. I immersed myself in nature, crawled, as it were, into the very essence of nature and away from the whole human world.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), p. 32.

[W]hat are words? Be tentative with words, value them well, take safe words, words without catches, do not spin them with one another so that no webs arise, for you are the first who is ensnared in them. For words have meanings. With words you pull up the underworld. Word, the paltriest and the mightiest. In words the emptiness and the fullness flow together. Hence the word is an image of God. The word is the greatest and the smallest that man created, just as what is created through man is the greatest and the smallest.

The Red Book (1915/2009), p. 299.

Try to tell the truth. You would like to tell the truth, I am sure. Nobody likes to lie if he is not forced to. But just tell the truth for twenty-four hours and see what happens! In the end you can’t stand yourself any more.

“Questions and Answers at Oxford” (1938), C. G. Jung Speaking, p. 109.

“Be yourself,” as the Americans say.

“Man’s Immortal Mind” (1935), C. G. Jung Speaking, p. 87.

[Y]ou always become the thing you fight the most.

“Diagnosing the Dictators” (1938), C. G. Jung Speaking, p. 129.

[N]othing is more thrilling than trying to understand. One comes to see that life is great and beautiful, that nonsense and stupidity do not always triumph.

“A Wartime Interview” (1942), C. G. Jung Speaking, p. 145.

Nature can help you only if you manage to get time for yourself. You need to be able to relax in the garden, completely at peace, or to walk. From time to time I need to stop, to just stand there. If someone were to ask me: What are you thinking of just now?—I wouldn’t know. I think unconsciously.

“On Creative Achievement” (1946), C. G. Jung Speaking, p. 166.

The life of most ideas consists in their controversial nature, i.e., that you can disagree with them, even if you recognize their importance for a majority. If you would fully agree with them, you could replace yourself just as well by a gramophone record. Moreover, if you don’t disagree, you are not good as a directeur de conscience, since there are many other people suffering from the same difficulty and being badly in need of your understanding.

Letter to Victor White, 10 April 1954, The Jung-White Letters, p. 238.

Nothing but unexpected things kept happening to me. Much might have been different if I myself had been different. But it was as it had to be; for all came about because I am as I am. Many things worked out as I planned them to, but that did not always prove of benefit to me. But almost everything developed naturally and by destiny.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), p. 358.

Not as my sorrow, but as the sorrow of the world; not a personal isolating pain, but a pain without bitterness that unites all humanity.

“The Structure of the Psyche” (1927/1931), CW 8, § 316.

If you discover what you call a truth, you should test it, try to eat it. If it feeds you it is good, but if you cannot live by it and only assume it ought to feed other people, then it is bad. The real test is that your truth should be good for yourself. Not one dog is coming to sniff at it if it doesn’t feed yourself. If you are not satisfied with it, if you cannot enjoy it for twenty, fifty years, or a whole lifetime, it is no good. If you are hungry, if you think your companions must be redeemed, and that they must be grateful to you on top of all, then you make a mistake: you may know the idea is no good. So don’t play the missionary. Don’t try to eat the goods of others. Let other people belong to themselves and look after their own improvement: let them eat themselves. If they are really satisfied, then nobody should disturb them. If they are not satisfied with what they possess, they will probably seek something better; and if you are the one who has the better thing, they will surely come and get it from you.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, Vol. I (31 October 1934), pp. 213–14.

[T]he way of nature will bring you quite naturally wherever you have to go.

Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934, Vol. I (10 June 1931), pp. 402–3.

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. Not consciously, of course—for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him.

Aion (1951), CW 9ii, § 18.

A visible enemy is always better than an invisible one.

The Psychology of the Transference (1946), CW 16, § 420.

[N]ietzsche began to write Zarathustra, which is his outstanding work, quite different from everything he did before and after, when he was between 37 and 38. That is the critical time. In the second part of life you begin to question yourself. Or rather, you don’t; you avoid such questions, but something in yourself asks them, and you do not like to hear that voice asking “What is the goal?” And next, “Where are you going now?” When you are young you think, when you get to a certain position, “This is the thing I want.” The goal seems to be quite visible. People think, “I am going to marry, and then I shall get into such and such a position, and then I shall make a lot of money, and then I don’t know what.” Suppose they have reached it; then comes another question: “And now what? Are we really interested in going on like this forever, for ever doing the same thing, or are we looking for a goal as splendid or as fascinating as we had it before?” Then the answer is: “Well, there is nothing ahead. What is there ahead? Death is ahead.” That is disagreeable, you see; that is most disagreeable. So it looks as if the second part of life has no goal whatever. Now you know the answer to that. From time immemorial man has had the answer: “Well, death is a goal; we are looking forward, we are working forward to a definite end.” The religions, you see, the great religions, are systems for preparing the second half of life for the end, the goal, of the second part of life.

“Questions and Answers at Oxford” (1938), C. G. Jung Speaking, pp. 106–7.

Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable—perhaps everything. No science will ever replace a myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science. For it is not that “God” is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth, rather it speaks to us as a Word of God. The Word of God comes to us, and we have no way of distinguishing whether and to what extent it is different from God.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), p. 340.

Unlived life is a destructive, irresistible force that works softly but inexorably.

“Woman in Europe” (1927), CW 10, § 252.

In my medical experience as well as in my own life I have again and again been faced with the mystery of love, and have never been able to explain what it is.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), p. 353.

Human imperfection is always a discord in the harmony of our ideals. Unfortunately, no one lives in the world as we desire it, but in the world of actuality where good and evil clash and destroy one another, where no creating or building can be done without dirtying one’s hands.

“Woman in Europe” (1927), CW 10, § 263.

People do fall in reality; they might even break a leg, as a sort of symbolic action. Accidents may happen, particularly when there is great unwillingness to go down consciously and intentionally. Then the unconscious simply takes people by the neck and forces them down, which, of course, may lead to disaster. It does not necessarily lead to disaster, but it may if one doesn’t help the thing along, if one doesn’t follow the intimations of fate willingly and consciously. So it is perfectly justifiable that the situation should arouse some fear, particularly the fear that the brakes are perhaps not strong enough; for there is some acceleration in going down that path to the unconscious—the speed has a tendency to increase. One finds when one takes the downward way that after a while it is almost too easy. Therefore we say that if you give the little finger to the devil, he takes the whole arm, and finally the whole body.

Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934, Vol. I (19 November 1930), pp. 93–94.

It is death to the soul to become unconscious. People die before there is death of the body, because there is death in the soul. They are mask-like leeches, walking about like spectres, dead but sucking. It is a sort of death. I have seen a man who has converted his mind into a pulp. You can succeed in going away from your problems, you need only to look away from them long enough. You may escape, but it is the death of the soul.

Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1938–1940 (23 January 1929), p. 90.

No one can know what the ultimate things are. We must therefore take them as we experience them. And if such experience helps to make life healthier, more beautiful, more complete and more satisfactory to yourself and to those you love, you may safely say: “This was the grace of God.”

Psychology and Religion (1938/1940), CW 11, § 167.

One must never look to the things that ought to change. The main question is how we change ourselves.

Letter to Eugen Diesel, 10 April 1942, Letters, Vol. I, p. 314.

Never say no or yes on principle. Say it only when you feel it is really yes. If it is really no, it is no. If you say yes for any outer reason, you are sunk.

“A Talk with Students at the Institute” (1958), C. G. Jung Speaking, p. 361.

It does not matter whether you do a thing or whether it happens to you; whether it reaches you from without or happens within, fate moves through yourself and outside circumstances equally. It is as if outside circumstances were simply projections of your own psychological structure. Of course subjectively it matters a lot, but psychologically it does not matter whether you are the cause of the misfortune or whether the misfortune comes to you. In either case you are miserable and that is all that counts; you are the victim whether it is a self-inflicted misery or whether the world has inflicted it upon you.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, Vol. II (6 May 1936), p. 896.

If you are completely destroyed by the world, then the world which destroyed you must be completely transformed, because you looked upon it with the eye that transforms, the eye that contains the germ of what is new.

Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934, Vol. I (21 May 1931), p. 361.

[L]ove is nothing in itself. It is always a special human being who loves and the love is worth just as much as the individual.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, Vol. II (10 June 1936), p. 997.

No one can make history who is not willing to risk everything for it, to carry the experiment with his own life through to the bitter end, and to declare that his life is not a continuation of the past, but a new beginning. Mere continuation can be left to the animals, but inauguration is the prerogative of man, the one thing he can boast of that lifts him above the beasts.

“Woman in Europe” (1927), CW 10, § 268.

[O]nly those individuals can attain to a higher degree of consciousness who are destined to it and called to it from the beginning, i.e., who have a capacity and an urge for higher differentiation. In this matter men differ extremely, as also do the animal species, among whom there are conservatives and progressives. Nature is aristocratic, but not in the sense of having reserved the possibility of differentiation exclusively for species high in the scale. So too with the possibility of psychic development: it is not reserved for specially gifted individuals. In other words, in order to undergo a far-reaching psychological development, neither outstanding intelligence nor any other talent is necessary, since in this development moral qualities can make up for intellectual shortcomings.

On the Psychology of the Unconscious (1917/1926/1943), CW 7, § 198.

The great thing to know is that the important things are not so important, and the unimportant things are not so unimportant.

Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934, Vol. I (3 June 1931), p. 390.

[J]ust as evening gives birth to morning, so from the darkness arises a new light, the stella matutina, which is at once the evening and the morning star—Lucifer, the light-bringer.

“The Spirit Mercurius” (1943/1948), CW 13, § 299.

What happens outside also happens in him, and what happens in him also happens outside.

“The Structure of the Psyche” (1927/1931), CW 8, § 329.

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 of something I do not know. In spite of all uncertainties, I feel a solidity underlying all existence and a continuity in my mode of being.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), p. 358.

This is how you must live—without reservation, whether in giving or withholding, according to what the circumstances require. Then you will get through. After all, if you should still get stuck, there is always the enantiodromia from the unconscious, which opens new avenues when conscious will and vision are failing.

“Four ‘Contacts with Jung,’” C. G. Jung Speaking, pp. 158–59.

The goal of life is the realization of the self. If you kill yourself you abolish that will of the self that guides you through life to that eventual goal. An attempt at suicide doesn’t affect the intention of the self to become real, but it may arrest your personal development inasmuch as it is not explained. You ought to realize that suicide is murder, since after suicide there remains a corpse exactly as with any ordinary murder.

Letter to Mrs. N., 13 October 1951, Letters, Vol. II, p. 25.

Even if the whole world were to fall to pieces, the unity of the psyche would never be shattered.

“The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man” (1933/1934), CW 10, § 306.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.

Psychology and Alchemy (1944), CW 12, § 126.

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. They then dwell in the house next door, and at any moment a flame may dart out and set fire to his own house. Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), p. 277.

One should never think that man can reach perfection, he can only aim at completion—not to be perfect but to be complete. That would be the necessity and the indispensable condition if there were any question of perfection at all. For how can you perfect a thing if it is not complete? Make it complete first and see what it is then. But to make it complete is already a mountain of a task, and by the time you arrive at absolute completion, you find that you are already dead, so you never reach that preliminary condition for perfecting yourself. Completion is not perfection; to make a building perfect one must first construct it, and a thing which is not even half finished cannot be perfected. First make it complete; then polish it up if you have time and breath left. But usually one’s whole life is eaten up in the effort at completion.

Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934, Vol. I (17 February 1932), p. 590.

Your questions are unanswerable because you want to know how one ought to live. One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way for the individual which is prescribed for him or would be the proper one. If that’s what you want you had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you what’s what. Moreover this way fits in with the average way of mankind in general. But if you want to go your individual way, it is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being of itself when you put one foot in front of the other. If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious. Then it is naturally no help at all to speculate about how you ought to live. And then you know, too, that you cannot know it, but quietly do the next and most necessary thing. So long as you think you don’t yet know what this is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate.

Letter to Frau N., 15 December 1933, Letters, Vol. I, pp. 132–33.

Ultimate truth, if there be such a thing, demands the concert of many voices.

“Foreword to Neumann: The Origins and History of Consciousness” (1949), CW 18, § 1236.

Wisdom is not and never has been something for the many, because foolishness forever will be the main thing the world craves for.

Letter to Mr. N., 25 October 1935, Letters, Vol. I, p. 200.

It is a general truth that one can only understand anything in as much as one understands oneself.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, Vol. I (4 December 1935), p. 742.

If you are in yourself, you become aware of your incapacity. You will see how little capable you are of imitating the heroes and of being a hero yourself. So you will also no longer force others to become heroes. Like you, they suffer from incapacity. Incapacity, too, wants to live, but it will overthrow your Gods.

The Red Book (1915/2009), p. 245.

It is no small matter to acknowledge one’s yearning. For this many need to make a particular effort at honesty. All too many do not want to know where their yearning is, because it would seem to them impossible or too distressing. And yet yearning is the way of life. If you do not acknowledge your yearning, then you do not follow yourself, but go on foreign ways that others have indicated to you. So you do not live your life but an alien one. But who should live your life if you do not live it? It is not only stupid to exchange your own life for an alien one, but also a hypocritical game, because you can never really live the life of others, you can only pretend to do it, deceiving the other and yourself, since you can only live your own life.

The Red Book (1915/2009), p. 249.

Fulfill that which comes to you.

The Red Book (1915/2009), p. 300.

Be the man through whom you wish to influence others.

“Problems of Modern Psychotherapy” (1929), CW 16, § 167.

The knowledge of your heart is how your heart is.

The Red Book (1915/2009), p. 234.

No one can or should halt sacrifice. Sacrifice is not destruction, sacrifice is the foundation stone of what is to come. Have you not had monasteries? Have not countless thousands gone into the desert? You should carry the monastery in yourself. The desert is within you. The desert calls you and draws you back, and if you were fettered to the world of this time with iron, the call of the desert would break all chains. Truly, I prepare you for solitude.

The Red Book (1915/2009), p. 230.

[A] lonely man like yourself will perhaps find companions. But these companions are all in yourself, and the more you find outside the less you are sure of your own truth. Find them first in yourself, integrate the people in yourself. There are figures, existences, in your unconscious that will come to you, that will integrate in you, so that you may perhaps come into a condition in which you don’t know yourself. You will say, I am this, I am that, I am practically everywhere, I am exactly like a whole people—and when doubt arises you are whole.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, Vol. II (12 February 1936), p. 831.

One can speak in beautiful words about love, but about life? And life stands above love. But love is the inescapable mother of life. Life should never be forced into love, but love into life. May love be subject to torment, but not life. As long as love goes pregnant with life, it should be respected; but if it has given birth to life from itself, it has turned into an empty sheath and expires into transience.

The Red Book (1915/2009), p. 327.

The serious problems in life, however, 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. This alone preserves us from stultification and petrification.

“The Stages of Life” (1930–31), CW 8, § 771.

To live oneself means: to be one’s own task. Never say it is a pleasure to live oneself. It will be no joy but a long suffering, since you must become your own creator. If you want to create yourself, then you do not begin with the best and the highest, but with the worst and the deepest. Therefore say that you are reluctant to live yourself. The flowing together of the stream of life is not joy but pain, since it is power against power, guilt, and shatters the sanctified.

The Red Book (1915/2009), pp. 249–50.

We imagine ourselves to be sort of supermen, like Nietzsche’s superman who said, God is dead. But if God is dead, he must be God, and so naturally a superman, lifted up beyond the human level. For a while that may give one a wonderful feeling of elation and grandeur, but before long one will be left high and dry because one is separated from the sources of life.

Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934, Vol. I (18 February 1931), p. 225.

Mankind feels that life has a meaning when one lives and there are relatively few exceptions to that rule.

Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934. Vol. I (3 December 1930), p. 138.

[L]et no day pass without humbly remembering that everything still has to be learned.

The Psychology of the Transference (1946), CW 16, § 464.

The tension of the future is unbearable in us. It must break through narrow cracks, it must force new ways. You want to cast off the burden, you want to escape the inescapable. Running away is deception and detour. Shut your eyes so that you do not see the manifold, the outwardly plural, the tearing away and the tempting. There is only one way and that is your way; there is only one salvation and that is your salvation. Why are you looking around for help? Do you believe that help will come from outside? What is to come is created in you and from you. Hence look into yourself. Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfil the way that is in you.

The Red Book (1915/2009), p. 308.

So long as he knows that he is the carrier of life and that it is therefore important for him to live, then, the mystery of his soul lives also—no matter whether he is conscious of it or not. But if he no longer sees the meaning of his life in its fulfilment, and no longer believes in man’s eternal right to this fulfilment, then he has betrayed and lost his soul, substituting for it a madness which leads to destruction, as our time demonstrates all too clearly.

Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955–56), CW 14, § 201.

A truth is only a truth when it lives, otherwise it is perfectly nonsensical; it must be able to change into its own opposite, to even become an untruth at times. So we cannot really identify with such a conviction or truth; we know that it moves under our feet and it doesn’t matter, or it should not matter, whether its aspect is positive or negative. But it is exceedingly difficult to think paradoxically, I admit.

Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934. Vol. II (21 February 1934), p. 1311.

Anyone who falls so low has depth.

“The Post-War Psychic Problems of the Germans” (1945), C. G. Jung Speaking, p. 153.

My life as I had lived it had often seemed to me like a story that has no beginning and no end. I had the feeling that I was a historical fragment, an excerpt for which the preceding and succeeding text was missing. My life seemed to have been snipped out of a long chain of events, and many questions had remained unanswered. Why had it taken this course? Why had I brought these particular assumptions with me? What had I made of them? What will follow? I felt sure that I would receive an answer to all these questions as soon as I entered the rock temple. There I would learn why everything had been thus and not otherwise. There I would meet the people who knew the answer to my question about what had been before and what would come after.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), p. 291.

You will realize what that means for a man who thinks he is the only one who suffers from his particular ailment and feels responsible for it. When he hears that it is a general problem, he is comforted, at once it puts him back into the lap of humanity; he knows that many people are having the same experience, and he can talk to them and is not isolated. Before, he didn’t dare speak about it; now he knows that everyone understands.

Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928–1930 (5 December 1928), p. 65.

I observe myself in the stillness of Bollingen and with all my experience of nearly eight decades must admit that I have found no rounded answer to myself. I am just as much in doubt about myself as before, the more so the more I try to say something definite. It is as though familiarity with oneself alienated one from oneself still further.

Letter to Aniela Jaffé, Bollingen, 6 April 1954, Letters, Vol. II, p. 163.

When thinking leads to the unthinkable, it is time to return to simple life. What thinking cannot solve, life solves, and what action never decides is reserved for thinking.

The Red Book (1915/2009), p. 293.

Happy is he who can be a hermit in his own desert. He survives.

The Red Book (1915/2009), p. 327.

The touchstone is being alone with oneself.

This is the way.

The Red Book (1915/2009), p. 330.

[I]f one loves life then surely something should come from it. You see, life wants to be real; if you love life you want to live really, not as a mere promise hovering above things. Life inevitably leads down into reality. Life is of the nature of water: it always seeks the deepest place, which is always below in the darkness and heaviness of the earth.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, Vol. I (29 May 1935), p. 508.