Carl Jung Quotes

The man who speaks with primordial images, speaks with a thousand tongues.

There is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are older than the historical man, which are inborn in him from the earliest times, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

Being a literature major, you know, I'm very familiar with the ways symbolism is used in our sort of mythic tales of society, so anyone who is consciously trying to pull that off I think is really interesting and clearly very smart.

When you allegorize, you're gonna get everybody saved somehow.

To me, a story can be both concrete and abstract, or a concrete story can hold abstractions. And abstractions are things that really can't be said so well with words.

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

I dislike Allegory - the conscious and intentional allegory - yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.

It was Jung who first said to explain the symbol as if talking to a man from mars who knew nothing about our life on earth.

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

I don't like allegory.

I seldom deal in symbolisms; if there be hidden meanings in my verse, they are there without my knowledge.

I usually don't like to 'spoon feed' my audience, because I grew up idolizing story tellers who tell stories using symbolism, so it was in my nature to do the same.

Myth is a powerful medium because it talks to the emotions and not the head. It moves us into an area of mystery.

We often find far more power in a symbol than in something that is an an actuality.

The images of Myth are reflections of Spiritual and Depth potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating those we evoke those powers in our own lives to operate through ourselves.

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.

It seems clear that the Bible belongs to an area of language in which metaphor is functional, and were we have to surrender precision for flexibility.

A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.

Axiom: you are a sea. Your eye- lids curve over chaos My hands where they touch you, create small inhabited islands soon you will be all earth: a known land, a country.

The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.

The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands.

In the products of the unconscious we discover mandala symbols, that is, circular and quaternity figures which express wholeness, and whenever we wish to express wholeness, we employ just such figures.

Everything in life is a metaphor.

If the grape is made of wine, then perhaps we are the words that tell who we are