All Quotes

"The spirits that I summoned up I now can't rid myself of."

"According to Jung dreams have many functions for the individual. They first of all compensate for the one-sided conscious attitude of the individual... these experiences tend to balance a person's conscious, outer life. They also reveal those things of which the individual wishes to remain unaware, confronting him with desires he has not faced up to. But dreams do more than this: they give intimations of meaning and reality which the individual has not yet touched, and they can even give directions for achieving this meaning and reality."

"It is... Jung's finding that men who try to live without contact with the unconscious and its symbolic and mythological meaning often fall sick both psychologically and physically. ...Until Jung could help them find contact with their unconscious roots, from which the rational materialism of today had cut them off, they could not get well. ...the real business of religion, as Jung maintained, is to keep men in touch with this level of reality, and this is done largely through the use of myths."

"my father was a Freudian analyst, as well as an anthropologist. He became a lay analyst. Freud said that dreaming is extremely important, and I probably absorbed that. Then I read Jung, and Jung has rather specific theories about dreams. Some of them made sense to me; some of them didn't."

"Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals."

"When Carl Jung classified the "rational" functions of the mind he divided them into thinking and feeling. We often consider feeling to be loose and nebulous, but for Jung it was one of the mind's strictly rational functions. Feeling, for Jung, is what assesses the inherent value of things. Feeling looks at the world globally rather than analytically. If thought is not balanced by feeling, then it can become obsessive and one-tracked, giving no attention to the overall meaning of what one is doing. Conversely, if feeling is not tempered by thought, then we are in danger of rushing into events with great enthusiasm and conviction without making proper plans or understanding possible pitfalls."

"There are also root dreams shared by the race as a whole. Most of these are not as symbolic as Jung thought them to be but are literal interpretations of the abilities used by the inner self. For that matter, as you know, flying dreams need not be symbolic of anything."

"Much later I read Jung, and when I went to Ireland I heard about an analyst who believed that what you are dominated by in your childhood is whatever your parents really love. I believe that now. I believe that I was dominated by what my father and my mother loved; it came through to me as deep sexuality centered in that forbidden aunt who was the figure of passion and sex in my early life, and through the opera singers and composers of the music that meant so much to them, and through the popular music of that time and the happiness of the young people who sat on the stoops and sang, and through the sadness my parents felt at that custom going out of the city."

"For Jung, the 'psychic world' (i.e. the world of the mind) was an independent reality, and it was possible to travel there and make the acquaintance of its inhabitants."

"Jung fiercely resented the implication that he was a hypocritical, self-seeking Judas, a 'rat'. Yet there was just enough truth in it to strike home. He was undoubtedly a man who liked his own way, no matter what the cost to others."

"Instruction does much, but encouragement everything."

"Wo viel Licht ist, ist starker Schatten."

"So gewiß ist der allein glücklich und groß, der weder zu herrschen noch zu gehorchen braucht, um etwas zu sein!"

"I hold to faith in the divine love — which, so many years ago for a brief moment in a little corner of the earth, walked about as a man bearing the name of Jesus Christ — as the foundation on which alone my happiness rests."

"One lives but once in the world."

"Getting along with women, Knocking around with men, Having more credit than money, Thus one goes through the world."

"When young, one is confident to be able to build palaces for mankind, but when the time comes one has one's hands full just to be able to remove their trash."

"Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind? Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind; Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm, Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm."

"Noble be man, Helpful and good! For that alone Sets hims apart From every other creature On earth."

"As great, everlasting, Adamantine laws Dictate, we must all Complete the cycles Of our existence."

"Only mankind Can do the impossible: He can distinguish, He chooses and judges, He can give permanence To the moment."

"Let the noble man Be generous and good, Tirelessly achieving What is just and useful: Let him be a model For those beings whom he surmises."

"In der Kunst ist das Beste gut genug."

"A noble person attracts noble people, and knows how to hold on to them."

"A talent is formed in stillness, a character in the world's torrent."

"The true, prescriptive artist strives after artistic truth; the lawless artist, following blind instinct, after an appearance of naturalness. The one leads to the highest peaks of art, the other to its lowest depths."

"In limitations he first shows himself the master, And the law can only bring us freedom."

"But among all the discoveries and corrections probably none has resulted in a deeper influence on the human spirit than the doctrine of Copernicus…. Possibly mankind has never been demanded to do more, for considering all that went up in smoke as a result of realizing this change: a second Paradise, a world of innocence, poetry and piety: the witness of the senses, the conviction of a poetical and religious faith. No wonder his contemporaries did not wish to let all this go and offered every possible resistance to a doctrine which in its converts authorized and demanded a freedom of view and greatness of thought so far unknown indeed not even dreamed of."

"One never goes so far as when one doesn't know where one is going."

"I have often felt a bitter sorrow at the thought of the German people, which is so estimable in the individual and so wretched in the generality. A comparison of the German people with other peoples arouses a painful feeling, which I try to overcome in every possible way."

"Von andern Seiten her vernahm ich ähnliche Klänge, nirgends wollte man zugeben, daß Wissenschaft und Poesie vereinbar seien. Man vergaß, daß Wissenschaft sich aus Poesie entwickelt habe, man bedachte nicht, daß, nach einem Umschwung von Zeiten, beide sich wieder freundlich, zu beiderseitigem Vorteil, auf höherer Stelle, gar wohl wieder begegnen könnten."

"Patriotism ruins history."

"Who wants to understand the poem Must go to the land of poetry; Who wishes to understand the poet Must go to the poet's land."

"For I have been a man, and that means to have been a fighter."

"Should I not be proud, when for twenty years I have had to admit to myself that the great Newton and all the mathematicians and noble calculators along with him were involved in a decisive error with respect to the doctrine of color, and that I among millions was the only one who knew what was right in this great subject of nature?"

"All poetry is supposed to be instructive but in an unnoticeable manner; it is supposed to make us aware of what it would be valuable to instruct ourselves in; we must deduce the lesson on our own, just as with life."

"I am more and more convinced that poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of men. ... I therefore like to look about me in foreign nations, and advise everyone to do the same. National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach."

"One must be something in order to do something."

"I have found a paper of mine among some others in which I call architecture 'petrified music.' Really there is something in this; the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music."

"If I work incessantly to the last, nature owes me another form of existence when the present one collapses."

"The artist may be well advised to keep his work to himself till it is completed, because no one can readily help him or advise him with it...but the scientist is wiser not to withhold a single finding or a single conjecture from publicity."

"Willst du immer weiterschweifen? Sieh, das Gute liegt so nah. Lerne nur das Glück ergreifen, denn das Glück ist immer da."

"O'er all the hilltops Is quiet now, In all the treetops Hearest thou Hardly a breath; The birds are asleep in the trees: Wait; soon like these Thou too shalt rest."

"Amerika, du hast es besser—als unser Kontinent, der alte."

"Who is the happiest of men? He who values the merits of others, And in their pleasure takes joy, even as though 'twere his own. Not in the morning alone, not only at mid-day he charmeth; Even at setting, the sun is still the same glorious planet."

"And now the sagacious reader, who is capable of reading into these lines what does not stand written in them, but is nevertheless implied, will be able to form some conception of the serious feelings with which I then set foot in Emmendingen."

"Nun aber wird der einsichtige Leser, welcher fähig ist, zwischen diese Zeilen hineinzulesen, was nicht geschrieben steht, aber angedeutet ist, sich eine Ahnung der ernsten Gefühle gewinnen, mit welchen ich damals Emmendingen betrat. www.zeno.org"

"A burgher may acquire merit; by excessive efforts he may even educate his mind; but his personal qualities are lost, or worse than lost, let him struggle as he will. Since the nobleman, frequenting the society of the most polished, is compelled to give himself a polished manner; since this manner, neither door nor gate being shut against him, grows at last an unconstrained one; since, in court or camp, his figure, his person, are a part of his possessions, and it may be the most necessary part, — he has reason enough to put some value on them, and to show that he puts some."

"No matter how far our spiritual culture may continue to progress, no matter how much the natural sciences may grow, becoming ever more profound and more inclusive, no matter how much the human spirit may will to expand, that human spirit will never escape from the majesty and ethical sublimity of Christianity, as it shimmers and shines in the Gospels."

"Mehr Licht!"