“An archetype is like an old watercourse along which the water of life has flowed for centuries, digging a deep channel for itself. The longer it has flowed in this channel the more likely it is that sooner or later the water will return to its old bed.” From Civilization in Transition, Paragraph 395, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung

“The hypothesis of a collective unconscious belongs to the class of ideas that people at first find strange but soon come to possess and use as familiar conceptions. This has been the case with the concept of the unconscious in general…A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. I call it the personal unconscious. But this personal unconscious rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the collective unconscious. I have chosen the term ‘collective’ because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behavior that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals. It is, in other words, identical in all men and thus constitutes a common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present in every one of us…The contents of the collective unconscious are known as archetypes…So far as the collective unconscious contents are concerned we are dealing with archaic or—I would say—primordial types, that is, with universal images that have existed since the remotest times…” From The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, The Collected Works of C.G .Jung

“Not for a moment dare we succumb to the illusion that an archetype can be finally explained and disposed of…The most we can do is to dream the myth onwards and give it a modern dress.” From The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, Paragraph 271, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung

“Do we ever understand what we think? We only understand that kind of thinking which is a mere equation, from which nothing comes out but what we have put in. That is the working of the intellect. But besides that there is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are older than the historical man, which are inborn in him from the earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them.” “Stages of Life,” in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche,” Paragraph 794, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung