The story of a life begins somewhere, at some particular point we happen to remember; and even then it was already highly complex.  We do not know how life is going to turn out.  Therefore the story has no beginning, and the end can only be vaguely hinted at.  -Carl Jung

. . . other people are established inalienably in my memories only if their names were entered in the scrolls of my destiny from the beginning, so that encountering them was at the same time a kind of recollection.  -Carl Jung

If only I could have accepted a=b.  But it was never to be.  -Carl Jung

Church gradually became a place of torment for me.  -Carl Jung

God is not human, I thought; that is His greatness, that nothing human impinges on Him.  He is kind and terrible -both at once- and is therefore a great peril from which everyone naturally tries to save himself.  -Carl Jung

I came to the conclusion that there must be something the matter with these philosophers, for they had the curious notion that God was a kind of hypothesis that could be discussed.  I also found it extremely unsatisfying that the philosophers offered no opinions or explanations about the dark deeds of God.  These, it seemed to me, merited special attention and consideration from philosophy, since they constituted a problem which, I gathered, was rather a hard one for the theologians.  All the greater was my disappointment to discover that the philosophers had apparently never even heard of it.  -Carl Jung

My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest.  Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light.  -Carl Jung

What were men, anyway?  They are born dumb and blind as puppies, I thought, and like all God’s creatures are furnished with the dimmest light, never enough to illuminate the darkness in which they grope. I was equally sure that none of the theologians I knew had ever seen the light that shineth in the darkness with his own eyes, for if they had they would not have been able to teach a theological religion, which seemed quite inadequate to me, since there was nothing to do with it but believe it without hope.  -Carl Jung

Here alone the two currents of my interest could flow together and in a united stream dig their own bed.  Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found.  Here at last was the place where the collision of nature and spirit became a reality.  -Carl Jung

RE: neurotics

I am speaking of those who cannot tolerate the loss of myth and who can neither find a way to a merely exterior world, to the world as seen by science, nor rest satisfied with an intellectual juggling with words, which has nothing whatsoever to do with wisdom.  -Carl Jung

The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.  The numinosum is dangerous because it lures men to extremes, so that a modest truth is regarded as the truth and a minor mistake is equated with fatal error.  Tout passé - yesterday’s truth is today’s deception, and yesterday’s false inference may be tomorrow’s revelation.  -Carl Jung

My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.  -Carl Jung

. . .I did my best not to lose my head but to find some way to understand these strange things.  I stood helpless before an alien world; everything in it seemed difficult and incomprehensible.  I was living in a constant state of tension; often I felt as if gigantic blocks of stone were tumbling down upon me.  One thunderstorm followed another. My enduring these storms was a question of brute strength.  Others have been shattered by them - Nietzsche, and Holderlin, and many others.  But there was a demonic strength in me, and from the beginning there was no doubt in my mind that I must find the meaning of what I was experiencing in these fantasies.  When I endured these assaults of the unconscious I had an unswerving conviction that I was obeying a higher will, and that feeling continued to uphold me until I had mastered the task.  -Carl Jung

. . . there are higher things than the egos will, and to these one must bow.  -Carl Jung

The anima might then have easily seduced me into believing that I was a misunderstood artist, and that my so-called artistic nature gave me the right to neglect reality. . . . Thus the insinuations of the anima, the mouthpiece of the unconscious, can utterly destroy a man.  -Carl Jung

As a young man my goal had been to accomplish something in my science.  But then, I hit upon this stream of lava, and the heat of its fires reshaped my life.  -Carl Jung

. . .any thinking about religious matters sent shudders of horror through him.  He wanted to rest content with faith, but faith broke faith with him.

-Carl Jung

Man always has some mental reservation, even in the face of divine decrees.  Otherwise, where would be his freedom?  And what would be the use of that freedom if it could not threaten Him who threatens it?  -Carl Jung

Reason sets the boundaries far too narrowly for us, and would have us accept only the known-and that too with limitations - and live in a known framework, just as if we were sure how far life actually extends.  -Carl Jung