Marie-Louise Von Franz Quotes

#1. Synchronistic events constitute moments in which a 'cosmic' or 'greater' meaning becomes gradually conscious in an individual; generally it is a shaking experience.

Marie-Louise Von Franz

#2. Number is therefore the most primitive instrument of bringing an unconscious awareness of order into consciousness.

Marie-Louise Von Franz

#3. As physics is a mental reconstruction of material processes, perhaps a physical reconstruction of psychic processes is possible in nature itself.

Marie-Louise Von Franz

#4. Dreams are like letters from God. Isn't it time you answered your mail?

Marie-Louise Von Franz

#5. In one African myth the word for God is even identical with skill and capacity. The Godhead is defined as that thing which appears in man as the mystery of an unusual skill or capacity. It is something divine, a spark of the divinity in him, not his own possession or achievement, but a miracle.

Marie-Louise Von Franz

#6. We always tend to keep within ourselves threshold reactions such as a little doubt, or a little impulse not to do something. If the impulses are not very strong we are inclined to put them aside in a one-sided way and by this we have hurt an animal or a spirit within us.

Marie-Louise Von Franz

#7. Numbers, furthermore as archetypal structural constants of the collective unconscious, possess a dynamic, active aspect which is especially important to keep in mind. It is not what we can do with numbers but what they do to our consciousness that is essential.

Marie-Louise Von Franz

#8. When not used as an instrument, the intellect becomes autonomous and dynamic and one can be sure that a man with such attitude is driven by his anima, otherwise he would discuss in a quiet, detached way.

Marie-Louise Von Franz

#9. If we can stay with the tension of
opposites long enough - sustain it,
be true to it - we can sometimes
become vessels within which the
divine opposites come together and
give birth to a new reality.

Marie-Louise Von Franz

#10. The mathematical forms of order which the mind of a physicist manipulates coincides "miraculously" with experimental measurements.

Marie-Louise Von Franz

#11. A human being in a neurotic state might very well be compared to a bewitched person, for people caught in a neurosis are apt to behave in a manner uncongenial and destructive towards themselves as well as others.

Marie-Louise Von Franz

#12. It's easy to be a naive idealist. It's easy to be a cynical realist. It's quite another thing to have no illusions and still hold the inner flame.

Marie-Louise Von Franz

#13. We could all be mediums, and all have absolute knowledge, if the bright light of our ego consciousness would not dim it.

Marie-Louise Von Franz

#14. My God, these Feeling types! ... Sensitive people are just tyrannical people - everybody else has to adapt to them.

Marie-Louise Von Franz

#15. Synchronicity ... means a 'meaningful coincidence' of outer and inner events that are not themselves causally connected. The emphasis lies on the word 'meaningful'.

Marie-Louise Von Franz

#16. The passionate reactions of people to a painting, the exclamation, 'Oh, this is wonderful,' may, even if meant in a positive way, entirely destroy the chiaroscuro, the mystical hidden weaving of fantasy which the artist needs ...

Marie-Louise Von Franz

#17. Especially in times of collective neurosis, the existence of ... mature people is of crucial importance.

Marie-Louise Von Franz

#18. The child is an inner possibility, the possibility of renewal.

Marie-Louise Von Franz

#19. If you think the anima as being "nothing but" what you know about her, you have not the receptiveness of a listening attitude, and so she becomes "nothing but" a load of brutal emotions; you have never given her a chance of expressing herself, and therefore she has become inhuman and brutal.

Marie-Louise Von Franz

#20. If a man devotes himself to the instructions of his own unconscious, it can bestow this gift [of renewal], so that suddenly life, which has been stale and dull, turns into a rich unending inner adventure, full of creative possibilities

Marie-Louise Von Franz

#21. There are people who cannot risk loneliness with the experience. They always have to be in a flock and have human contact.

Marie-Louise Von Franz

#22. It is as if something somewhere were 'known' in the form of images - but not by us.

Marie-Louise Von Franz

#23. Jung even asserted that he would have no objection to regarding the psyche as a quality of matter and matter as a concrete aspect of the psyche, provided that the psyche was understood to be the collective unconscious.

Marie-Louise Von Franz

#24. One has to consider what effect it would have on one to have to accept the fact that God was not the friendly guardian of kindergarten!

Marie-Louise Von Franz

#25. You see, in the image of Aquarius, it's a man who pours water into the fish. Now the fish is the unconscious. It is not enough just to have it. We have to actively turn towards it and support it so that it then helps us.

Marie-Louise Von Franz

#26. Number ... should not be understood solely as a construction of consciousness, but also as an archetype and thus as a constituent of nature both without and within.

Marie-Louise Von Franz

#27. Creativity sometimes needs the protection of darkness, of being ignored. That is very obvious in the natural tendency many artists and writers have not to show their paintings or writings before they are finished.

Marie-Louise Von Franz