C.G. Jung quote: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedu…”

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

“There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

“Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.”

Edna O'Brien (1930) Novelist, memoirist, biographer, playwright, poet and short story writer

Source: In the Forest

“Each of us has only this one brief experience with the bright light of consciousness in that endless dark night of eternity and must make the most of it. Doing this means we must respect the existence of everyone else and the most criminal act imaginable is the terminating of one of these conscious existences.”

Harry Harrison The Stainless Steel Rat

The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge (1970)
The Stainless Steel Rat
Context: Cold-blooded killing is just not my thing. I've killed in self-defence, I'll not deny that, but I still maintain an exaggerated respect for life in all forms. Now that we know that the only thing on the other side of the sky is more sky, the idea of an afterlife has finally been slid into the history books alongside the rest of the quaint and forgotten religions. With heaven and hell gone we are faced with the necessity of making a heaven or hell right here. What with societies and metatechnology and allied disciplines we have come a long way and life on the civilised worlds is better than it was during the black days of superstition. But with the improving of here and now comes the stark realisation that here and now is all we have. Each of us has only this one brief experience with the bright light of consciousness in that endless dark night of eternity and must make the most of it. Doing this means we must respect the existence of everyone else and the most criminal act imaginable is the terminating of one of these conscious existences.

“The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

Source: A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal on the Affairs of North America

“Our moral virtues benefit mainly other people; intellectual virtues, on the other hand, benefit primarily ourselves; therefore the former make us universally popular, the latter unpopular.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

“Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.”

Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) German philosopher and sociologist

John Cumming trans., p. 7.
Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment] (1944)

“Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.”

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society

John Cumming trans., p. 7
Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment] (1944)

“We say God and the imagination are one…
How high that highest candle lights the dark.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

"Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour"
Collected Poems (1954)
Context: We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

“Be warned, therefore, that one does not go to hell to light a cigarette.”

Roger Zelazny book This Immortal

Source: This Immortal (1965), p. 83

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

C.G. Jung 257

Related quotes

Related topics