Carl Jung

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown. ”

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity. ”

I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life - that is to say, over 35 - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. ”

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life's morning. ”

In the child, consciousness rises out of the depths of unconscious psychic life, at first like separate islands, which gradually unite to form a 'continent,' a continuous landmass of consciousness. Progressive mental development means, in effect, extension of consciousness. ”

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. ”

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind. ”

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood? ”

Shrinking away from death is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose. ”

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. ”