Experience (n.) is never directly except in the case of the the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images.
Experience (n.) is something the pure sensation type accumulates without using — the more pronounced his type, the less his life deserves the name “experience” at all.
Experience (n.) must be made at once of every occurrence in the introvert's abstracting attitude, and a law for all time drawn from it — though the opposite rule, that no occurrence should become an experience lest it produce laws that hamper the future, is equally human.
Experience (n.) that is direct and lived is the only counterweight to the blind power of the instincts; no intellectual system will do.
Experience (n.) that impresses us is probably a break-through into an old, previously unconscious river-bed cut by our ancestors.
Experience (n.) is our most real certainty and yet an intricate structure of mental images: nothing is experienced directly but the mind, which translates, filters, allegorizes, twists and falsifies — we invented the exact sciences to catch a glimmer through the fog.
Experience (n.) cannot be made; it happens — though we can draw closer, by ways we should beware of calling “methods.”
Experience (n.) wrongly taken as personal when it is universal isolates a man from human society: his attitude is too personal.
Experience (n.) that is genuine has nothing to fear from objections, justified or not — it always holds the stronger position.
Experience (n.) must sometimes simply be gone through, and reason is no substitute; patients testing whether they can still live infantilely should not be stopped, as such adventures can be of inestimable value.
Experience (n.) set against the authority of tradition was Paracelsus' basic theme; it freed science for investigation but also bred the conflict of knowledge and faith that poisoned the nineteenth century.
Experience (n.) is what matters with the archetype, not its intellectual representation, which adds nothing to the experience of wholeness and helps only when the road to original experience is blocked.
Experience (n.) matters more than knowing the truth, Jung wrote in 1930: a "clear" answer stays in the head and rarely reaches the heart, and the great problem is finding the way to wordless inner experience.