The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature Quotes

“The book [Joyce's "Ulysses"] can just as well be read backwards, for it has no back and no front, no top and no bottom. Everything could easily have happened before, or might have happened afterwards. You can read any of the conversations just as pleasurably backwards, for you don't miss the point of the gags. Every sentence is a gag, but taken together they make no point. You can also stop in the middle of a sentence--the first half still makes sense enough to live by itself, or at least seems to. The whole work has the character of a worm cut in half, that can grow a new head or a new tail as required.”
― C.G. Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature

“Prophets are always disagreeable and usually have bad manners, but it is said that they occasionally hit the nail on the head . . . like every true prophet, the artist is the unwitting mouthpiece of the psychic secrets of his time and is often as unconscious as a sleep-walker.”
― Carl Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature

“Sentimentality is the supestructure erected upon brutality.”
― C.G. Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature

“It [Joyce's "Ulysses"] plays on the reader's sympathies to his own undoing unless sleep kindly intervenes and puts a stop to this drain of energy. Arrived at page 135, after making several heroic efforts to get at the book, to "do it justice", as the phrase goes, I fell at last into profound slumber.”
― C.G. Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature

“A great work of art is like a dream. To grasp its meaning, one must allow oneself to be shaped by it, the way it has shaped the poet.”
― C.G. Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature