Shadow Quotes

The meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one's own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well.
-Carl Jung

Nothing determines who we will become so much as those things we choose to ignore.
-Sandor McNab

The purpose of the shadow is to provide the human soul with the opposition and tension to develop a tough inner resolve and determination to clarify through the challenge of the opposites.
-John Conyer

There is no hidden poet in me, just a little piece of God that might grow into poetry.
-Etty Hillesum

Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.

Izumi Shikibu, Translated by Jane Hirschfield and Mariko

This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.
-Shakespeare

Psychoanalysis still preserves the initiatory pattern...
The patient is asked to descend into himself...
This dangerous operation resembles initiatory descents into hell, the realm of ghosts, and combats with monsters.
-Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane

The great epochs of our life lie at the points where we gain courage to rebaptize our badness as the best in us.
-Nietzsche

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
-Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

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