Archetype Quotes

“Hitler was the archetype of the abstemious man. When the other krauts saw him drink water in the Beer Hall they should have known he was not to be trusted.”

— A.J. Liebling

“The archetype of the witch is long overdue for celebration. Daughters, mothers, queens, virgins, wives, et al. derive meaning from their relation to another person. Witches, on the other hand, have power on their own terms. They have agency. They create. They praise. They commune with nature/ Spirit/God/dess/Choose-your-own-semantics, freely, and free of any mediator. But most importantly: they make things happen. The best definition of magic I've been able to come up with is "symbolic action with intent" - "action" being the operative word. Witches are midwives to metamorphosis. They are magical women, and they, quite literally, change the world.”

— Pamela J. Grossman

“Many in business feel they have to live up to a machismo archetype of the big-swinging-dick business leader”

— Jon Miller

“In that moment, I finally figured out what kind of handsome he was. He was fiction-handsome. Romance novel handsome; but not the clean-cut (billionaire) alpha male or even the tattooed (billionaire) bad boy archetype. He was the Scottish highlander, Viking conqueror, bodice-ripper historical romance kind of handsome; an unshaven, lion wrestling, mountain man recluse, toss you over his shoulder and plunder your goodies kind of handsome. He was both scary and swoony. I wanted to braid his beard. I also wanted to run away.”

— Penny Reid

“In fiction, I searched for my favorite authors, women I have trusted to reassure me than not all teenage guys are total ditwads, that the archetype of the noble cute hero who devotes himself to the girl he loves has not gone the way of the rotary phone. That all I had to do was be myself (smart, hardworking, funny) and be patient and kind and he and I would find each other.
As Bea would say, this why they call it fiction.”

— Sarah Strohmeyer

“There is perhaps no more rewarding romance heroine than she who is not expected to find love. The archetype comes in many disguises - the wallflower, the spinster, the governess, the single mom - but always with one sad claim: Love is not in her cards.”

— Sarah MacLean

“I only became an actor to get your attention, to challenge the archetype of an African American male; I can't be anything else in this lifetime than an African American man.”

— Isaiah Washington

“In the jungle of modern permissiveness the meaning and purpose of sex is missed, and its glory is lost. Our benighted society urgently needs recalling to the noble and ennobling view of sex that Scripture implies and the seventh commandment assumes: namely, that sex is for fully and permanently committed relationships that, by being the blend of affection, loyalty, and biology that they are, prepare us for and help us into that which is their archetype-"the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united" to God, men, and angels "in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water" (C. S. Lewis).”

— Anonymous.

“We all have the archetype inside us of the enlightened being.”

— Dan Millman

“Annie Wilkes was the perfect audience, a woman who loved stories without having the slightest interest in the mechanics of making them. She was the embodiment of that Victorian archetype, Constant Reader.”

— Stephen King

“From the days of biplanes and silk scarves, the aviator has been the archetype of masculine glamour. Aviators have personified national ideals, from French elan to Soviet party discipline. They've inspired lust and admiration. They've turned sunglasses and short, utilitarian leather jackets into fashion statements.”

— Virginia Postrel

“Mexico was conquered more by manipulation of myth and archetype.”

— Norman Spinrad

“Ever since childhood Yurii Andreievich had been fond of woods seen at evening against the setting sun. At such moments he felt as if he too were being pierced by shafts of light. It was as though the gift of the living spirit were streaming into his breast, piercing his being and coming out at his shoulders like a pair of wings. The archetype that is formed in every child for life and seems for ever after to be his inward face, his personality, awoke in him in its full primordial strength, and compelled nature, the forest, the afterglow, and everything else visible to be transfigured into a similarly primordial and all-embracing likeness of a girl. Closing his eyes, "Lara," he whispered and thought, addressing the whole of his life, all God's earth, all the sunlit space spread out before him.”

— Boris Pasternak

“Once you become a celebrity, you are no longer a person, but an archetype.”

— Jennette McCurdy

“I love Tris the Divergent, who makes decisions apart from faction loyalty, who isn't some faction archetype. But the Tris who's trying as hard as she can to destroy herself ... I can't love her.”

— Anonymous.

“From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

“In my experience, as a young black artist, you have to fulfill an archetype, or be a token - and I was unwilling to do that.”

— Solange Knowles

“If you're going to go to an audition, you don't want to go in trying to force yourself into some archetype that has been thought up by a director and translated by a casting director.”

— Timothy Simons

“But was the prototype of human existence; it was the original pattern or the archetype on which our life here below had been modeled.”

— Karen Armstrong

“I don't think there's an archetype for the Justin Bieber fan. A Bieber fan just looks like an American. You wouldn't even need a costume to try and resemble one.”

— Fred Armisen

“Apparently, the pathfinder duck is a psychological archetype in certain cultures.”

— Michael Leunig

“Often in the case of these sudden transformations one can prove that an archetype has been at work for a long time in the unconscious, skilfully arranging circumstances that will unavoidably lead to a crisis.”

— C.G. Jung

“In 1952, through his collaboration with the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, Jung argued that there existed a principle of acausal orderedness that underlay such "meaningful coincidences," which he called synchronicity. He claimed that under certain circumstances, the constellation of an archetype led to a relativization of time and space, which explained how such events could happen. This was an attempt to expand scientific understanding to accommodate events such as his visions of 1913 and 1914.”

— C.G. Jung

“The Birth-chart has to be understood as the archetype or seed-pattern of one's individual being - as the 'symbolic' form of one's individuality, and therefore also of one's destiny, for the two are identical.”

— Dane Rudhyar

“Thought as such ... is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it; this is what thought has inherited from its archetype, the relation between labor and material. Today, when ideologues tend more than ever to encourage thought to be positive, they cleverly note that positivity runs precisely counter to thought, and that it takes friendly persuasion by social authority to accustom thought to positivity.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

“Now, I'm not even saying that girls shouldn't have princesses in their lives, the archetype in and of itself is not innately wrong, but there should be more options to choose from. So that was my intent, to demonstrate how ridiculous it is to paint an entire gender of heroes with one superficial brush.”

— David Trumble

“The ebb and flow as an artist is a bizarre experience, for sure. I was lucky enough to become successful pretty young - in late '79, 1980 - with a body of work that got recognized and became an archetype.”

— Robert Longo

“In broad outline and in detail, the life of Jesus as portrayed in the gospels corresponds to the worldwide Mythic Hero Archetype in which a divine hero's birth is supernaturally predicted and conceived, the infant hero escapes attempts to kill him, demonstrates his precocious wisdom already as a child, receives a divine commission, defeats demons, wins acclaim, is hailed as king, then betrayed, losing popular favor, executed, often on a hilltop, and is vindicated and taken up to heaven.”

— Robert M. Price

“Hope always draws the soul from the beauty which is seen to what is beyond, always kindles the desire for the hidden through what is constantly perceived. Therefore, the ardent lover of beauty, although receiving what is always visible as an image of what he desires, yet longs to be filled with the very stamp of the archetype.”

— Gregory Of Nyssa

“Down through the years my face has been called a sour puss, a dead pan, a frozen face, The Great Stone Face, and, believe it or not, "a tragic mask." On the other hand that kindly critic, the late James Agee, described my face as ranking "almost with Lincoln's as an early American archetype, it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful." I can't imagine what the great rail splitter's reaction would have been to this, though I sure was pleased.”

— Buster Keaton

“Unconscious of your story, you are in its grasp; but with consciousness, an alchemical process begins: The solidity of the complex dissolves and you can open up to the arrival of a new archetype, the birth of a new cycle of life. In the shadow, then, lies our myth and our fate.”

— Connie Zweig

“In the etheric body are centered the forces animating man's physical vehicle, so disease is evidenced in the etheric before it manifests in the physical. The etheric, composed of finer, more attenuated substances than the physical, is corresponding amenable to vibratory influences. It is upon the former that harmony and rhythm have the most potent effect. Good music readjusts its molecular structure in accordance with the original divine plan, the archetype, and refines and accentuates it's vibratory currents. All forms of beauty and harmony increase this regenerating process.”

— Corinne Heline

“I like to be challenged and stay true to my archetype. That's something I don't admit of being like in real life and I don't have to be. I always try to understand what would lead an individual to being that way, to being oblivious to the fact that he's somewhat insensitive and scared of commitment, and that psychological journey, and what traumas may have occurred in this person's childhood to bring him to that point.”

— Romany Malco

“We all recall the cruel stepmother in fairy tales. That archetype is often a necessary element in a fairy tale so that the heroine/hero can become a person of character and power. Stories of heroes and heroines often begin with a wound or loss or injustice and end with heroic acts of restoration.”

— David Richo

“I've always been an admirer of women who walk the line of being very feminine and powerful at the same time. That has always been my archetype because too many powerful women, I fend intimidating and frightening, and I never want to scare anybody. I want to be warm and cuddly and yet, powerful at the same time.”

— Doreen Virtue

“When I was growing up in school, I wasn't the archetype of the classic American nerd; I was just different.”

— Andy Biersack

“Go back to The October Palace, which came out in 1994, and there are poems with windows, doors, the rooms of the gorgeous and vanishing palace that is this ordinary world and ordinary life. Jungian archetype would say the house is a figure for the experienced, experiencing self.”

— Jane Hirshfield

“Geometry is the archetype of the beauty of the world.”

— Johannes Kepler

“First therefore let us seek the dignity of knowledge in the archetype or first platform, which is in the attributes and acts of God, as far as they are revealed to man and may be observed with sobriety; wherein we may not seek it by the name of Learning; for all Learning is Knowledge acquired, and all Knowledge in God is original: and therefore we must look for it by another name, that of Wisdom or Sapience, as the Scriptures call it.”

— Francis Bacon

“A history-stopping archetype is being released into the skies of this planet, and if we are not careful it will halt all intellectual inquiry in the same way that the Christos archetype halted intellectual inquiry in the Hellenistic Age.”

— Terence McKenna

“The things I encounter that I call elves or gnomes, it's just a gloss. I mean, they're small, and they have the archetype. They're more like leprechauns, and this maybe raises a racial issue.”

— Terence McKenna

“My wife always has a splitting archetype whenever I want to have sex.”

— Bill Maher

“What happens in the life of Christ happens always and everywhere. In the Christian archetype all lives of this kind are prefigured.”

— Carl Jung

“It is only through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious. We cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities. Both are border-line concepts for transcendental contents. But empirically it can be established, with a sufficient degree of probability, that there is in the unconscious an archetype of wholeness. Strictly speaking, the God-image does not coincide with the unconscious as such, but with this special content of it, namely the archetype of the Self.”

— Carl Jung

“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

“The Western 'God-image' is a representation of the collective unconscious, an archetype of the psyche that undergoes a continual process of transformation ... The God image evolves through its relationship to humanity. Whoever knows God has an effect on 'him'. For the individual, knowing God, is the process of recognizing and assimilating the pressured and paradoxical contents of the self, which come to consciousness- seek incarnation- within the ego.”

— Carl Jung

“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

“Goal setting is fine if you want to be the warrior archetype. These people are setting goals constantly and trying to get someplace else. They say, "If you don't know where you are going, then you won't know when you get there."”

— Wayne Dyer

“The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter's at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,
faint copies of an invisible archetype.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“People hire me to create some kind of archetype or some culture type, or something. I guess they accept whatever I come up with.”

— Lily Tomlin