The religions should constantly recall to us the origin and original
character of the spirit, lest man should forget what he is drawing into
himself and with what he is filling his consciousness. He himself did not
create the spirit, rather the spirit makes him creative, always spurring him
on, giving him lucky ideas, staying power, "enthusiasm" and "inspiration."

"The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales" (1946). In CW 9, Part I: The
Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. P.393
 

There are many spirits, both light and dark. We should, therefore, be
prepared to accept the view that spirit is not absolute, but something
relative that needs completing and perfecting through life.

"Spirit and Life" (1926). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche.
P. 645
 

Being that has soul is living being. Soul is the living thing in man, that
which lives of itself and causes life. Therefore God breathed into Adam a
living breath, that he might live. With her cunning play of illusions the
soul lures into life the inertness of matter that does not want to live. She
makes us believe incredible things, that life may be lived. She is full of
snares and traps, in order that man should fall, should reach the earth,
entangle himself there, and stay caught, so that life should be lived; as
Eve in the garden of Eden could not rest content until she had convinced
Adam of the goodness of the forbidden apple. Were it not for the leaping and
twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness.

"Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious" (1935). In CW 9, Part I:
Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. P.56

The immortality of the soul insisted upon by dogma exalts it above the
transitoriness of mortal man and causes it to partake of some supernatural
quality. It thus infinitely surpasses the perishable, conscious individual
in significance, so that logically the Christian is forbidden to regard the
soul as a "nothing but." As the eye to the sun, so the soul corresponds to
God. Since our conscious mind does not comprehend the soul it is ridiculous
to speak of the things of the soul in a patronizing or depreciatory manner.
Even the believing Christian does not know God's hidden ways and must leave
him to decide whether he will work on man from the outside or from within,
through the soul.

Psychology and Alchemy (1944). CW 12: P.11
 

The wheel of history cannot be put back; we can only strive towards an
attitude that will allow us to live out our fate as undisturbedly as the
primitive pagan in us really wants. Only on this condition can we be sure of
not perverting spirituality into sensuality, and vice versa; for both must
live, each drawing life from the other.

"Marriage as a Psychological Relationship" (1925). In CW 17: The Development
of the Personality. P.336
 

It would be blasphemy to assert that God can manifest himself everywhere
save only in the human soul. Indeed the very intimacy of the relationship
between God and the soul precludes from the start any devaluation of the
latter. It would be going perhaps too far to speak of an affinity; but at
all events the soul must contain in itself the faculty of relation to God,
i.e., a correspondence, otherwise a connection could never come about.

Psychology and Alchemy (1944). CW 12: P.11

Reason can give a man equilibrium only if his reason is already an
equilibrating organ. But for how many individuals and at what periods in
history has it been that? As a rule, a man needs the opposite of his actual
situation to force him to find his place in the middle. For the sake of mere
reason he can never forgo life's riches and the sensuous appeal of the
immediate situation. Against the power and delight of the temporal he must
set the joy of the eternal, and against the passion of the sensual the
ecstasy of the spiritual. The undeniable reality of the one must be matched
by the compelling power of the other.

Psychological Types (1921). CW 6. P.386

Man finds himself simultaneously driven to act and free to reflect. This
contrariety in his nature has no moral significance, for instinct is not in
itself bad any more than spirit is good. Both can be both. Negative
electricity is as good as positive electricity: first and foremost it is
electricity.

"On the Nature of the Psyche" (1947). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of
the Psyche. P.406

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing
their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises,
observe a strict regimen of diet, learn the literature of the whole
world-all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the
slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls.
Thus the soul has gradually been turned into a Nazareth from which nothing
good can come. Therefore let us fetch it from the four corners of the
earth-the more far-fetched and bizarre it is the better!

Psychology and Alchemy (1944). CW 12: P.126
 

Whoever speaks of the reality of the soul or psyche is accused of
"psychologism." Psychology is spoken of as if it were "only" psychology and
nothing else. The notion that there can be psychic factors which correspond
to the divine figures is regarded as a devaluation of the latter. It smacks
of blasphemy to think that a religious experience is a psychic process; for,
so it is argued, a religious experience "is not only psychological."
Anything psychic is only Nature and therefore, people think, nothing
religious can come out of it. At the same time such critics never hesitate
to derive all religions-with the exception of their own-from the nature of
the psyche.

Psychology and Alchemy (1944). CW 12: P.9
 

Were it not a fact of experience that supreme values reside in the soul
(quite apart from the antimimon pneuma who is also there), psychology would
not interest me in the least, for the soul would then be nothing but a
miserable vapour. I know, however, from hundredfold experience that it is
nothing of the sort, but on the contrary contains the equivalents of
everything that has been formulated in dogma and a good deal more, which is
just what enables it to be an eye destined to behold the light. This
requires limitless range and unfathomable depth of vision. I have been
accused of "deifying the soul." Not I but God himself has deified it!

Psychology and Alchemy (1944). CW 12: P.14

To have soul is the whole venture of life, for soul is a life-giving daemon
who plays his elfin game above and below human existence, for which
reason-in the realm of dogma-he is threatened and propitiated with
superhuman punishments and blessings that go far beyond the possible deserts
of human beings. Heaven and hell are the fates meted out to the soul and not
to civilized man, who in his nakedness and timidity would have no idea of
what to do with himself in a heavenly Jerusalem.

"Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious" (1935). In CW 9, Part I:
Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. P.56

The gods of Greece and Rome perished from the same disease as did our
Christian symbols: people discovered then, as today, that they had no
thoughts whatever on the subject. On the other hand, the gods of the
strangers still had unexhausted mana. Their names were weird and
incomprehensible and their deeds portentously dark-something altogether
different from the hackneyed chronique scandaleuse of Olympus. At least one
couldn't understand the Asiatic symbols, and for this reason they were not
banal like the conventional gods. The fact that people accepted the new as
unthinkingly as they had rejected the old did not become a problem at that
time. Is it becoming a problem today? Shall we be able to put on, like a new
suit of clothes, ready-made symbols grown on foreign soil, saturated with
foreign blood, spoken in a foreign tongue, nourished by a foreign culture,
interwoven with foreign history, and so resemble a beggar who wraps himself
in kingly raiment, a king who disguises himself as a beggar? No doubt this
is possible. Or is there something in ourselves that commands us to go in
for no mummeries, but perhaps even to sew our garment ourselves?

"Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious" (1935). In CW 9, Part I:
Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. P.26
 

Anyone who has lost the historical symbols and cannot be satisfied with
substitutes is certainly in a very difficult position today: before him
there yawns the void, and he turns away from it in horror. What is worse,
the vacuum gets filled with absurd political and social ideas, which one and
all are distinguished by their spiritual bleakness. But if he cannot get
along with these pedantic dogmatisms, he sees himself forced to be serious
for once with his alleged trust in God, though it usually turns out that his
fear of things going wrong if he did so is even more persuasive.

"Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious" (1935). In CW 9, Part I:
Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. P.28

To gain an understanding of religious matters, probably all that is left us
today is the psychological approach. That is why I take these thought-forms
that have become historically fixed, try to melt them down again and pour
them into moulds of immediate experience. It is certainly a difficult
undertaking to discover connecting links between dogma and immediate
experience of psychological archetypes, but a study of the natural symbols
of the unconscious gives us the necessary raw material.

"Psychology and Religion" (1938). In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West
and East. P. 148

Eternal truth needs a human language that alters with the spirit of the
times. The primordial images undergo ceaseless transformation and yet remain
ever the same, but only in a new form can they be understood anew. Always
they require a new interpretation if, as each formulation becomes obsolete,
they are not to lose their spellbinding power over that fugax Mercurius and
allow that useful though dangerous enemy to escape. What is that about "new
wine in old bottles"? Where are the answers to the spiritual needs and
troubles of a new epoch? And where the knowledge to deal with the
psychological problems raised by the development of modern consciousness?
Never before has "eternal" truth been faced with such a hubris of will and
power.

"The Psychology of Transference" (1946). In CW 16: The Practice of
Psychotherapy. P.396
 

Modern man has heard enough about guilt and sin. He is sorely enough beset
by his own bad conscience, and wants rather to know how he is to reconcile
himself with his own nature-how he is to love the enemy in his own heart and
call the wolf his brother.

"Psychotherapists or the Clergy" (1932). In CW 11: Psychology and Religion:
West and East. P.523

The mere act of enlightenment may have destroyed the spirits of nature, but
not the psychic factors that correspond to them, such as suggestibility,
lack of criticism, fearfulness, propensity to superstition and prejudice-in
short, all those qualities which make possession possible. Even though
nature is depsychized, the psychic conditions which breed demons are as
actively at work as ever. The demons have not really disappeared but have
merely taken on another form: they have become unconscious psychic forces.

"After the Catastrophe" (1945). In CW 10: Civilization in Transition. P.431

Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so
subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it. It may help us
to escape all criticism, we may even be able to deceive ourselves in the
belief of our obvious righteousness. But deep down, below the surface of the
average man's conscience, he hears a voice whispering, "There is something
not right," no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion
or by the moral code.

"Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious" (1935). In CW 9, Part I:
Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. P.80
 

Our intellect has achieved the most tremendous things but in the meantime
our spiritual dwelling has fallen into disrepair. We are absolutely
convinced that even with the aid of the latest and largest reflecting
telescope, now being built in America, men will discover behind the farthest
nebulae no fiery empyrean; and we know that our eyes will wander
despairingly through the dead emptiness of interstellar space. Nor is it any
better when mathematical physics reveals to us the world of the infinitely
small. In the end we dig up the wisdom of all ages and peoples, only to find
that everything most dear and precious to us has already been said in the
most superb language. Like greedy children we stretch out our hands and
think that, if only we could grasp it, we would possess it too. But what we
possess is no longer valid, and our hands grow weary from the grasping, for
riches lie everywhere, as far as the eye can reach. All these possessions
turn to water, and more than one sorcerers apprentice has been drowned in
the waters called up by himself-if he did not first succumb to the saving
delusion that this wisdom was good and that was bad. It is from these adepts
that there come those terrifying invalids who think they have a prophetic
mission. For the artificial sundering of true and false wisdom creates a
tension in the psyche, and from this there arises a loneliness and a craving
like that of the morphine addict, who always hopes to find companions in his
vice.

Psychology and Alchemy (1944). CW 12: P.31

We could call sexuality the spokesman of the instincts, which is why from
the spiritual standpoint sex is the chief antagonist, not because sexual
indulgence is in itself more immoral than excessive eating and drinking,
avarice, tyranny, and other extravagances, but because the spirit senses in
sexuality a counterpart equal and indeed akin to itself. For just as the
spirit would press sexuality, like every other instinct, into its service,
so sexuality has an ancient claim upon the spirit, which it once-in
procreation, pregnancy, birth, and childhood-contained within itself, and
whose passion the spirit can never dispense with in its creations.

"On Psychic Energy" (1928). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the
Psyche. P.107

The spiritual principle does not, strictly speaking, conflict with instinct
as such but only with blind instinctuality, which really amounts to an
unjustified preponderance of the instinctual nature over the spiritual. The
spiritual appears in the psyche also as an instinct, indeed as a real
passion, a "consuming fire," as Nietzsche once expressed it. It is not
derived from any other instinct, as the psychologists of instinct would have
us believe, but is a principle sui generis, a specific and necessary form of
instinctual power.

"On Psychic Energy" (1928). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the
Psyche. P.108
 

Through scientific understanding, our world has become dehumanized. Man
feels himself isolated in the cosmos. He is no longer involved in nature and
has lost his emotional participation in natural events, which hitherto had a
symbolic meaning for him. Thunder is no longer the voice of a god, nor is
lightning his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree means a
man's life, no snake is the embodiment of wisdom, and no mountain still
harbours a great demon. Neither do things speak to him nor can he speak to
things, like stones, springs, plants, and animals. He no longer has a
bush-soul identifying him with a wild animal. His immediate communication
with nature is gone for ever.

Man and His Symbols (1964). In CW 18: P.95

The conflict between nature and spirit is itself a reflection of the paradox
of psychic life. This reveals a physical and a spiritual aspect which appear
a contradiction because, ultimately, we do not understand the nature of
psychic life itself. Whenever, with our human understanding, we want to make
a statement about something which in the last analysis we have not grasped
and cannot grasp, then we must, if we are honest, be willing to contradict
ourselves, we must pull this something into its antithetical parts in order
to be able to deal with it at all. The conflict between the physical and the
spiritual aspects only shows that psychic life is in the last analysis an
incomprehensible "something."

"Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology" (1931). In CW 8: The Structure
and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.680

We have stripped all things of their mystery and numinosity: nothing is holy
any longer.

Man and His Symbols (1964). In CW 18: P.95

Myths are miracle tales and treat of all those things which, very often, are
also objects of belief. In the everyday world of consciousness such things
hardly exist; that is to say, until 1933 Only lunatics would have been found
in possession of living fragments of mythology. After this date the world of
heroes and monsters spread like a devastating fire over whole nations,
proving that the strange world of myth had suffered no loss of vitality
during the centuries of reason and enlightenment. If metaphysical ideas no
longer have such a fascinating effect as before, this is certainly not due
to any lack of primitivity in the European psyche, but simply and solely to
the fact that the erstwhile symbols no longer express what is now welling up
from the unconscious as the end-result of the development of Christian
consciousness through the centuries. This end result is a true antimimon
pneuma, a false spirit of arrogance, hysteria, woolly-mindedness, criminal
amorality, and doctrinaire fanaticism, a purveyor of shoddy spiritual goods,
spurious art, philosophical stutterings, and Utopian humbug, fit only to be
fed wholesale to the mass man of today. That is what the post-Christian
spirit looks like.

Aion (1951) CW 9, Part II: P.66

Life is a touchstone for the truth of the spirit. Spirit that drags a man
away from life, seeking fulfilment only in itself, is a false spirit-though
the man too is to blame, since he can choose whether he will give himself up
to this spirit or not. Life and spirit are two powers or necessities between
which man is placed. Spirit gives meaning to his life, and the possibility
of its greatest development. But life is essential to spirit, since its
truth is nothing if it cannot live.

"The Practical Use of Dream Analysis" (1934) In CW 16: The Practice of
Psychotherapy. P.647
 

To find happiness in the spirit one must be possessed of a "spirit" to find
happiness in. A life of ease and security has convinced everyone of all the
material joys, and has even compelled the spirit to devise new and better
ways to material welfare, but it has never produced spirit. Probably only
suffering, disillusion, and self-denial do that.

"Return to the Simple Life" In DU I:3 (1941) In CW 18: P.6

If we were conscious of the spirit of the age, we should know why we are so
inclined to account for everything on physical grounds; we should know that
it is because, up till now, too much was accounted for in terms of spirit.
This realization would at once make us critical of our bias. We would say:
most likely we are now making exactly the same mistake on the other side. We
delude ourselves with the thought that we know much more about matter than
about a "metaphysical" mind or spirit, and so we overestimate material
causation and believe that it alone affords us a true explanation of life.
But matter is just as inscrutable as mind. As to the ultimate things we can
know nothing, and only when we admit this do we return to a state of
equilibrium.

"Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology" (1931). In CW 8: The Structure
and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.657