Quotes & Sayings About Archetypes

Christianity sees plants and flowers as created by God to show forth and share with humans the divine goodness, beauty and truth - the purpose of all Creation. In this flowers may be enjoyed simply and directly in themselves as showing forth God's goodness and beauty, or, more fully, as archetypes, signatures, symbols, and bearers of legends, mirroring the revealed articles of Christian faith - thereby serving as means for their teaching, recollection, contemplation and celebration. — John Stokes

The one who re-creates from that which has died is always a double-sided archetype. The Creation Mother is always also the Death Mother and vice versa. Because of this dual nature, or double-tasking, the great work before us is to learn to understand what around and about us and what within us must live, and what must die. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Within the studies and on the screen, the Jews could simply create a new country - an empire of their own, so to speak, one where they would not only be admitted, but would govern as well. The would create its values and myths, its traditions and archetypes. — Neal Gabler

Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise
the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer. — Milan Kundera

We live with our archetypes, but can we live in them? — Poul Anderson

I'm just saying, when a woman in a maiden, she's in the spotlight. Everybody cares what a pretty, young girl does and says. And she's got some pretty strict archetypes to adhere to: Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella or Britney Spears. Pick your poison. But when you become a young mother? People don't give a fuck what you're doing. Their eyes glaze over before they even finish asking you. Once a woman starts doing the most important work of her life, all of a sudden, nobody wants to know a thing about it. — Rufi Thorpe

You have to carry so many archetypes as an actor, especially as a blonde-haired, blue-eyed one. — Kristin Lehman

Was Giza the mirror of the sky? In addition, what was the number 137 purpose? The number 137 has a very amazing meaning and it can range from modern Science to Kabbalah, from Archetypes numerology to Eastern philosophy, from smaller particles to the law of Universal Balance. ... Did the builders want to convey their scientific knowledge through the Pyramids proportions? ... Was their function connected to the number 137? — Armando Mei

There are many people making a difference. I mean, Dr. King never held an office. Gandhi never held an office. There are people who are archetypes in our society who have never held office and made a difference. — Dennis Kucinich

Women are not in control of their bodies; nature is. Ancient mythology, with its sinister archetypes of vampire and Gorgon, is more accurate than feminism about the power and terror of female sexuality. — Camille Paglia

We women, when we're searching for a meaning to our lives or for the path of knowledge, always identify with one of four classic archetypes.
The Virgin (and I'm not speaking here of a sexual virgin) is the one whose search springs from her complete independence, and everything she learns is the fruit of her ability to face challenges alone.
The Martyr finds her way to self-knowledge through pain, surrender and suffering.
The Saint finds her true reason for living in unconditional love and in her ability to give without asking anything in return.
Finally, the Witch justifies her existence by going in search of complete and limitless pleasure. — Paulo Coelho

We're actors - we're the opposite of people! — Tom Stoppard

The Warrior archetype is hard-wired into our brain structure. Socialization means repression, which only keeps aggressiveness in an all the more volatile, compressed, and explosive form. But aggression is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. In many ways legitimate aggression contributes vitally to our lives. In aggression we find our drives for life, career, social contact, self-definition, and service. Perseverance and fidelity are products of the Warriors determination. Though the Lover initiates a relationship, it is the Warrior who maintains it-without the Warrior the Lover is merely promiscuous. The answer then is not to banish any of the archetypes, but to work on achieving the maturity necessary to manage them. — Douglas Gillette

If you know your archetypes - and not just yours, if you know how to perceive the world in archetypes, through archetypes - everything changes. Everything. Because you have two things: you can see through one eye which is impersonal, and through the other, which is personal. That's the way the game is written down here. — Caroline Myss

Archetypes, in spite of their conservative nature, are not static but in a continuous dramatic flux. Thus the self as a monad or continuous unit would be dead. But it lives inasmuch as it splits and unites again. There is no energy without opposites! — Carl Jung

There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the forms of images filled with content, but at first only as forms without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action. — Carl Jung

The starry vault of heaven is in truth the open book of cosmic projection, in which are reflected the mythologems, i.e., the archetypes. In this vision astrology and alchemy, the two classical functionaries of the psychology of the collective unconscious, join hands. — C. G. Jung

Between the theme parks and the movies, the Disney iconography was probably the first set of archetypes that I was exposed to. Walt was able to expose me as a child to the full array of emotions, including fear and sorrow. Those movies and attractions haunted my dreams and made a deep impression on me as a child. — Jon Favreau

In those days it was possible for a Greek to flee from an over-abundant reality as though it were but the tricky scheming off the imagination-and to flee, not like Plato into the land of eternal ideas, into the workshop off the world-creator, feasting one's eyes on the unblemished unbreakable archetypes, but into the rigor mortis off the coldest emptiest concept off all, the concept of being. — Friedrich Nietzsche

In a few decades of reconstruction, even the mathematical natural sciences, the ancient archetypes of theoretical perfection, have changed habit completely! — Edmund Husserl

Political movements rest not so much on rational attitudes as on fantasies, images, words, and archetypes that come together to make up this or that political kitsch. — Milan Kundera

When we place our immediate conflicts in the territory of an archetypal story we can better see the nature of our problems and find solutions that bring creative imagination to bear in the realm of hard facts and hardening dilemmas. — Michael Meade

Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimaeras - dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies - may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition - but they were there before. They are transcripts, types - the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us at all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body - or without the body, they would have been the same ... That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual - that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy - are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence. — Charles Lamb

If it be true that there can be no metaphysics transcending human reason, it is no less true that there can be no empirical knowledge that is not already caught and limited by the a priori structure of cognition. — C. G. Jung

The way I sometimes approach my work, when I look at a script for the first time, is to identify what the archetypes are and what the writing is trying to do in that context. — Sarah Gadon

Archetypes resemble the beds of rivers: dried up because the water has deserted them, though it may return at any time. An archetype is something like an old watercourse along which the water of life flowed for a time, digging a deep channel for itself. The longer it flowed the deeper the channel, and the more likely it is that sooner or later the water will return. — Carl Jung

Learn the true topography; the monstrous and wonderful archetypes are not inside you, not inside your consciousness; you are inside them, trapped and howling to get out — R.A. Lafferty

I think about people and events in terms of archetypes a lot. — Zephyr Teachout

Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture. The forces of imagination and the Apollonian dream are saved only by myth from indiscriminate rambling. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child's mind and interpreting to the mature man his life and struggles. — Friedrich Nietzsche

We may wonder at the choice of Israel and Rome as the archetypes of the new nation, in view of the long history of suffering of the former and the decline of the latter. We may wonder that our ancestors over-looked the darker days of those earlier nations. They did not. They hoped to construct a republic on principles to sound that if we should decline in piety and public virtue we would meet the inexorable fate of nations, which are as but dust in the hands of God. — Robert Neelly Bellah

Small Man can be a very funny or a very tiresome Tour Companion, depending on how this kind of thing grabs you. He gambles, he drinks too much and he always runs away. Since the Rules allow him to make Jokes, he will excuse his behaviour in a variety of comical ways. Physically he is stunted and not at all handsome, although he usually dresses flamboyantly. He tends to wear hats with feathers in. You will discover he is very vain. But, if you can avoid smacking him, you will come to tolerate if not love him. He will contrive, in some cowardly way, to play a major part in saving the world. — Diana Wynne Jones

The part of the tradition that I knew best was mostly written (or rewritten for children) in England and northern Europe. The principal characters were men. If the story was heroic, the hero was a white man; most dark-skinned people were inferior or evil. If there was a woman in the story, she was a passive object of desire and rescue (a beautiful blond princess); active women (dark, witches) usually caused destruction or tragedy. Anyway, the stories weren't about the women. They were about men, what men did, and what was important to men. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Yet, we must never 'throw the baby out with the bathwater'".

~R. Alan Woods [2012] — R. Alan Woods

A lot of names in America and Europe have their roots in Latin and Greek words. A lot of them go back to archetypes and their stories. — Maynard James Keenan

The librarian, the warrior, the free spirit ... archetypes are a great jumping off point to help clarify where we want to go with a character. — Kristan Higgins

My characters are all kind of geek archetypes of people I've encountered at gaming and comic book conventions. — Ernest Cline

'Illustrado' is not an autobiography. Only the ideas are autobiographical; the ideas of bitterness, frustration, unchanging society, an individual lost, social awkwardness ... The book satirises archetypes from across Filipino society, and I felt that the least I could do was offer myself up, too. — Miguel Syjuco

... our aim has been to provide anyone who is seriously interested with an introduction to the world of the archetypes, and to make this introduction as simple as possible. For this reason we have included ... a number of schemas, or diagrams, which as experience has shown, make things much easier for most people, though by no means for all. Erich Neumann, The Great Mother, p.xii. — Erich Neumann

When you acknowledge the audience's shadow you become their hero. — Luis Cubero

For me Esoteric Hitlerism is being possessed by the archetypes of the collective unconscious which the Greeks used to call gods. — Miguel Serrano

All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes. — Carl Jung

As I regard physics and psychology as complementary types of examination, I am certain that there is an equally valid way that must lead the psychologist 'from behind' (namely, through investigating the archetypes) into the world of physics. As an example of background physics, I shall discuss a motif that occurs regularly in my dreams - namely, fine structure, in particular doublet structure of spectral lines and the separation of a chemical element into two isotopes. — Wolfgang Pauli

A woman has her Juno, just as a man has his Genius; they are names for the sacred power, the divine spark we each of us have in us. My Juno can't "get into" me, it is already my deepest self. The poet was speaking of Juno as if it were a person, a woman, with likes and dislikes: a jealous woman.
The world is sacred, of course, it is full of gods, numina, great powers and presences. We give some of them names
Mars of the fields and the war, Vesta the fire, Ceres the grain, Mother Tellus the earth, the Penates of the storehouse. The rivers, the springs. And in the storm cloud and the light is the great power called the father god. But they aren't people. They don't love and hate, they aren't for or against. They accept the worship due them, which augments their power, through which we live. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Science fiction, because it ventures into no man's lands, tends to meet some of the requirements posed by Jung in his explorations of archetypes, myth structures and self-understanding. It may be that the primary attraction of science fiction is that it helps us understand what it means to be human. — Frank Herbert

Remember that the Tarot is a great and sacred arcanum - its abuse is an obscenity in the inner and a folly in the outer. It is intended for quite other purposes than to determine when the tall dark man will meet the fair rich widow. — Jack Parsons

Mythology didn't cease to exist and be useful to Pagans when we gained digital watch technology. — Thomm Quackenbush

People who avoid shadow scare me. — Fierce Dolan

You have to be able to connect to the world of archetypes. That is not so easy, and most people in the West have no clue, that that is necessary, because they have no clue of what that means. They see the image, they see Buddha here, but they don't see what the image represents. Its one thing to see with this physical eyes, it's another thing to see with this spiritual eye. — Robert Svoboda

The Alchemical world view, in stark contrast to the scientific world view, where rational deterministic man is completely separated from both Nature and the Self, in fact the Self does not even exist. In the alchemical world view, all three are inextricably woven together and in "synchronistic" or "archetypal" events & occurrences in one's life, all distinctions between them blur and almost disappear. — Craig Nelson

Jung said there are four archetypes adults go through, and these archetypes are reflected in the development of my work. The first archetype is the archetype of the athlete, reflecting the time in our adult life when our primary emphasis is on our body - what it looks like, how beautiful it is, how strong it is, and so on. We identify ourselves with our body. We are our body. Growing adults next move to what Jung called the archetype of the warrior. We take our physical bodies out there to do what warriors do. — Wayne Dyer

The tricks of magic follow the archetypes of narrative fiction - there are tales of creation and loss, death and resurrection, and obstacles that must be overcome. — Marco Tempest

Angels and demons were identical
interchangeable archetypes
all a matter of polarity. The guardian angel who conquered your enemy in battle was perceived by your enemy as a demon destroyer. — Dan Brown

I really believe that an awakening, a greater perspective on our lives and existence is happening. It's really the firing of archetypes that are already built into our brains, we just are able to awaken to a point where we can see a greater beauty in the world, a greater connection and sense of well being. This is what the mystics speak about. The insights fire us up into a greater consciousness on the planet. So it is a greater consciousness at the same time and a greater awareness of our spiritual nature. That is what the 'aha' is. — James Redfield

Psychedelic drugs, especially psilocybin, allow a searchlight to be thrown on these deeper levels of the psyche, as Jung correctly stated. But it is not a museum of archetypes or psychic constructs, as he seemed to assume. It is a frontier of wholeness into which any person, so motivated and so courageous as to wish to do it, can go and leave the mundane plane far behind. — Terence McKenna

I think all artists struggle to represent the geometry
of life in their own way, just like writers deal with
archetypes. There are only so many stories that you can
tell, but an infinite number of storytellers. — Henry Mosquera

I look at the story, I look at the idea and just try to think of it in terms of that whole body of myth and see where the characters fit in and what they ought to be doing-all those archetypes are there to play with. — John Boorman

Sometimes I forget what I put in. I want to capture things in that way, where you're looking into your memory, a dream or hallucination. The characters become a mixture of archetypes, [and] that's what I like. You're trying to figure it out and your brain wants to categorize things, but it can't because of this motion. You want to solve the problem, but it never gets solved. It's like when you read a really good book and the story never leaves you. — Ali Banisadr

New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media. — Marshall McLuhan

I used the phrases Jungian realism and linear archetypes, and congratulated myself on achieving a level of douchbaggery I had previously only witnessed in shampoo commercials for men. — Catherine Lowell

Dr. Kunkel's teacher, Dr. Jung, believed that archetypes are blueprints of the basic human qualities we all share. The archetypes themselves are undefinable natural patterns or forces that shape life in all ages and places. They cannot be known directly, but archetypal themes and images appear in myth, fairy tales, dreams, and fantasies. We tend to think of ourselves as unique individuals, and to a great extent we are. But just as there are shared patterns that shape our physical existence, such as having two arms and legs, two eyes, ten fingers and toes, so there are underlying patterns that shape our psychic existence. — Robert A. Johnson

I feel like a lot of people talk about in rom-coms, there's the female best friend. There's all those archetypes in rom-coms. But even among a movie about man-children hanging out, there is always the one who's often the fat one, often the one with the beard, who is like the man-childest of them all. He's the one that eventually meets the fat girl or the quirky girl of the girl group of friends and really hits it off. — Jon Gabrus

With respect to the respective French and German traditions you are no doubt correct, although I am reluctant to see individual achievement reduced to archetypes. — Brian Ferneyhough

I drove all night, northeast, and once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days, the archetypes of the dismal mystery, sons and daughters of the archetypes, images that could not be certain which of two confusions held less terror, their own or what their own might become if it ever faced the truth. I drove at insane speeds. — Don DeLillo

I just watched so many Westerns as a kid that you end up using archetypes and sort of tropes of that genre, because there's a language there and you can twist it and turn it on its head or play to it or go sideways at any time. — Gore Verbinski

One reason why the cycle of archetypes recurs is that each youth generation tries to correct or compensate for what it perceives as the excesses of the midlife generation in power. For example, Boomers (a Prophet generation, whose strength is individualism, culture and values) raised Millennial children (a Hero generation, whose strength is in collective civic action). Archetypes do not create archetypes like themselves, they create opposing archetypes. Your generation isn't like the generation that shaped you, but it has much in common with the generation that shaped the generation that shaped you. — William Strauss

I did not deliberately invent Earthsea, I did not think 'Hey wow - islands are archetypes and archipelagoes are superarchetypes and let's build us an archipelago! I am not an engineer, but an explorer. I discovered Earthsea. — Ursula K. Le Guin

There is good reason for supposing that the archetypes are the unconscious images of the instincts themselves, in other words, that they are patterns of instinctual behaviour. — C. G. Jung

I've never read Joseph Campbell, and I don't know all that much about story archetypes. — Christopher Nolan

These superhero and mythical stories have, in many cases, replaced Biblical stories as vehicles for communal myths, but they are hardly any better than ancient magical adventures tinged with mythical archetypes and the decidedly unnuanced black-and-white struggle between good and evil. — Gudjon Bergmann

You know what's so cool about gaming? The whole collective consciousness thing! Like when you tap into your own knight in shinning armor, you're tapping into all knights in shinning armor. All these archetypes, you know, are we're all of them, and you have to learn to honour and acknowledge them inside you."
"Plus, you get to be people you're not."
"Um. True. And people you are. — Devin Grayson

All ages before ours believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment in symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, which is to say, as archetypes of the unconscious. No doubt this discovery is hardly credible as yet. — Carl Jung

[W]hen the modern mythmaker, the writer of literary fairy tales, dares to touch the old magic and try to make it work in new ways, it must be done with the surest of touches. It is, perhaps, a kind of artistic thievery, this stealing of old characters, settings, the accoutrements of magic. But then, in a sense, there is an element of theft in all art; even the most imaginative artist borrows and reconstructs the archetypes when delving into the human heart. That is not to say that using a familiar character from folklore in the hopes of shoring up a weak narrative will work. That makes little sense. Unless the image, character, or situation borrowed speaks to the author's condition, as cryptically and oracularly as a dream, folklore is best left untapped. — Jane Yolen

The zodiac's twelve signs are said to represent powerful archetypes that are universal in theme. — Bil Tierney

That's what novels are: They're amalgams of archetypes, collections of random traits one observes in other people through life, blended into fresh characters. — Michael Callahan

Moffat's prose is fine: clear and steady, with just enough sweeping statements about destiny and dragons to keep things well inflated. The characters are appealing archetypes: Fernwen the scholarly dwarf is the everynerd, doing his best to live through the adventure. Telemach Half-Blood is the hero you wish you could be. He always has a plan, always has a solution, always has secret allies that he can call upon - pirates and sorcerers whose allegiance he earn with long-ago sacrifices. — Robin Sloan

I do so love my witches and wicked queens. I find myself drawn to feminine archetypes that previous generations have found threatening or dangerous: crones, oracles, madwomen, Amazons, virgins who aren't helpless, bad mothers. I love to give the vagina dentata voice. It so rarely gets to speak for itself. — Catherynne M Valente

Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud's terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The Golden Bough was popular with both scholars and laymen, and it dramatically influenced the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung - Frazer's depiction of tales of myth and romance as echoes of ancient rituals chimed with Jung's description of archetypes that exist within the collective unconscious - as — George Pendle

Manners are the root, laws only the trunk and branches. Manners are the archetypes of laws. Manners are laws in their infancy; laws are manners fully grown,
or, manners are children, which, when they grow up, become laws. — Horace Mann

Men should not be sexing their women in the missionary position because they are facing away from the sky. Instead of looking down, men are to look up. To the vastness of Father Sky — Matthew Fox

I start out giving characters archetypes and parameters. Once I know the basics and have a rudimentary model, it's easier to carve unique curves and edges. It's quite easy to guess how a character is going to react if you know their background, and at a certain point, you realize you understand them personally. — Victoria Aveyard

Most religious stories and mythologies have some sort of similar root, some sort of global archetypes. — Maynard James Keenan

Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness. — C. G. Jung

That's not the part of the story that I'm interested in, anyway. The part that I'm interested in is all the personal stuff. I tried to base the powers on family archetypes. — Brad Bird

Slender Youth. A tour companion who may be either a lost prince or a girl/princess in disguise. In the latter case it is tactful to pretend you think she is a boy. She/he will be ignorant, hasty and shy, and will need hauling out of trouble quite a lot. But she/he will grow up in the course of the Tour. In fact she/he will be the only Companion who will change in any way. Quite often, she/he will soon exhibit a very useful talent for magic and end up by hauling everyone else out of trouble. But this will not be until midway through your second brochure. — Diana Wynne Jones

I'm not interested in types. I'm interested in archetypes. — Miuccia Prada

I often wondered why I was attracted to certain landscapes and not others and why my photographs (and depictions by other artists) looked the way they did, Archetypes imprinted on my mind started me on a search ... — John Pfahl

We like our archetypes and heroes to be what they are at face value. And life doesn't work out like that. — Laura Dern

Colour, Figure, Motion, Extension and the like, considered only so many Sensations in the Mind, are perfectly known, there being nothing in them which is not perceived. But if they are looked on as notes or Images, referred to Things or Archetypes existing without the Mind, then are we involved all in Scepticism. — George Berkeley

The whole film is about people being convinced that they can reduce themselves to their archetypes. — Atom Egoyan

The psyche is the inward experience of the human body, which is essentially the same in all human beings, with the same organs, the same instincts, the same impulses, the same conflicts, the same fears. Out of this common ground have come what Jung has called the archetypes, which are the common ideas of myths. — Joseph Campbell

Because I knew that racist Negro Archetypes, like Bebe's Kids, don't die. They multiply. — Paul Beatty

While archetypes may emanate through us for short periods of time, in what we call numinous experience, no woman can emanate an archetype continuously. Only the archetype itself can withstand such projections such as ever-able, all giving, eternally energetic. We may try to emulate these, but they are ideals, not achievable by humans, and not meant to be. Yet the trap requires that women exhaust themselves trying to achieve these unrealistic levels. To avoid the trap, one has to learn to say 'Halt' and 'Stop the music,' and of course mean it. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

That's what noir feels like to me. It feels like some kind of recurring dream, with very strong archetypes operating. You know, the guilty girl being pursued, falling, all kinds of stuff that we see in our dreams all the time. — Brian De Palma

There's a wide spectrum between a Navy SEAL hero-killer and a traumatized victim, but those are the archetypes - hashed and rehashed in the media, in popular culture, in the minds of people with a lot of preconceived notions but not much else. — Phil Klay

Fire and Water are archetypes, the split sides of consciousness; one aware, the other, not. The two parts of us that desire synthesis, yet resist it: the self and the shadow. But they are also the element of chance, of the random roll of dice. — Chris Abani

Archetypes are universal, and, in subtle or extravagant ways, interchangeable. — Tanith Lee

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

All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I love Athena. I love all the goddesses and the archetypes and what they represent because I think they're always going to be relevant not just to women but to humanity. They're living energy. There's a lot we can still learn from them. — Isabel Lucas