Analytical psychology was created by Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Gustav Jung, sometimes known as C. G. Jung. The notions of archetypes, the collective unconscious, and extraversion and introversion were all put out and developed by Jung. His research has had a significant impact on psychiatry as well as the realms of philosophy, religion, anthropology, archaeology, literature, and allied studies. He wrote a great deal, yet many of his compositions were not released until after his passing.
Carl Gustav Jung Quotes
“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“There’s no coming to consciousness without pain.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not. ”
― Carl G. Jung
“Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“We cannot change anything unless we accept it.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ — all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself — that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness — that I myself am the enemy who must be loved — what then? As a rule, the Christian’s attitude is then reversed; there is no longer any question of love or long-suffering; we say to the brother within us “Raca,” and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide it from the world; we refuse to admit ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Shame is a soul eating emotion.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune. ”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success of money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears.”
― Carl Gustav Jung, Memories
“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves. ”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“What you resist, persists”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Nights through dreams tell the myths forgotten by the day.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Every human life contains a potential, if that potential is not fulfilled, then that life was wasted…”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Sensation tell us a thing is.
Thinking tell us what it is this thing is.
Feeling tells us what this thing is to us.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
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“I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”
― Carl G. Jung
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how things are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“…anyone who attempts to do both, to adjust to his group and at the same time pursue his individual goal, becomes neurotic.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Deep down, below the surface of the average man’s conscience, he hears a voice whispering, “There is something not right,” no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or moral code.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.
—address to the Society for Psychical Research in England”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions – not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation or something I do not know.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.
Swiss psychologist (1875 – 1961)”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Words are animals, alive with a will of their own”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“When an inner situation is not made conscious it appears outside as fate.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual becomes.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Every Mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother and every mother extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Without this playing with fantasy, no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Sometimes you have to do something unforgivable just to be able to go on living.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“What if I should discover that the poorest of the beggars and the most impudent of offenders are all within me; and that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I, myself, am the enemy who must be loved — what then?”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“In each of us there is another whom we do not know.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The true leader is always led.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Nobody can fall so low unless he has a great depth.
If such a thing can happen to a man, it challenges his best and highest on the other side; that is to say, this depth corresponds to a potential height, and the blackest darkness to a hidden light.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“With a truly tragic delusion,” Carl Gustav Jung noted, “these theologians fail to see that it is not a matter of proving the existence of the light, but of blind people who do not know that their eyes could see. It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Nobody, as long as he moves among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of grater freedom is canceled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us. The less we understand of what our [forebears] sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Neitzche called the spirit of gravity. (p.236)”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“We are not what happened to us,
we are what we wish to become.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Life really does begin at forty. Up until then, you are just doing research.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world color and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I can “experience” is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except 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.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “man” in a higher sense— he is “collective man”— one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic forms of mankind.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The highest, most decisive experience is to be alone with one’s own self. You must be alone to find out what supports you, when you find that you can not support yourself. Only this experience can give you an indestructible foundation.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“People don’t have ideas. Ideas have people.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“We are born at a given moment, in a given place, and like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season in which we are born.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Somewhere, right at the bottom of one’s own being, one generally does know where one should go and what one should do. But there are times when the clown we call “I” behaves in such a distracting fashion that the inner voice cannot make its presence felt.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The fool is the precursor to the savior.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate; it oppresses.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“I don’t aspire to be a good man. I aspire to be a whole man.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Faith, hope, love, and insight are the highest achievements of human effort. They are found-given-by experience.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The sight of a child…will arouse certain longings in adult, civilized persons — longings which relate to the unfulfilled desires and needs of those parts of the personality which have been blotted out of the total picture in favor of the adapted persona.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life – that is to say, over 35 – there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Where your fear is,
there is your task.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“I am looking forward enormously to getting back to the sea again, where the overstimulated psyche can recover in the presence of that infinite peace and spaciousness.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“I am no longer alone with myself, and I can only artificially recall the scary and beautiful feeling of solitude. This is the shadow side of the fortune of love.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The gods have become our diseases.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“”…the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Life is a battleground. It always has been, and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The girl dreams she is dangerously ill. Suddenly birds come out of her skin and cover her completely … Swarms of gnats obscure the sun, the moon, and all the stars except one. That one start falls upon the dreamer.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“When you are up against a wall, put down roots like a tree, until clarity comes from deeper sources to see over that wall and grow.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The sad truth is that man’s real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites—day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Intuition does not denote something contrary to reason, but something outside of the province of reason.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“A group experience takes place on a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual. This is due to the fact that, when many people gather together to share one common emotion, the total psyche emerging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche. If it is a very large group, the collective psyche will be more like the psyche of an animal, which is the reason why the ethical attitude of large organizations is always doubtful. The psychology of a large crowd inevitably sinks to the level of mob psychology. If, therefore, I have a so-called collective experience as a member of a group, it takes place on a lower level of consciousness than if I had the experience by myself alone.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The Wrong we have Done, Thought, or Intended Will wreak its Vengeance on
Our SOULS.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“For better to come, good must stand aside.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“An old alchemist gave the following consolation to one of his disciples: “No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Christians often ask why God does not speak to them, as he is believed to have done in former days. When I hear such questions, it always makes me think of the rabbi who asked how it could be that God often showed himself to people in the olden days whereas nowadays nobody ever sees him. The rabbi replied: “Nowadays there is no longer anybody who can bow low enough.”
This answer hits the nail on the head. We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions. The Buddhist discards the world of unconscious fantasies as useless illusions; the Christian puts his Church and his Bible between himself and his unconscious; and the rational intellectual does not yet know that his consciousness is not his total psyche.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Creative power is mightier than its possessor.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“If we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us.
–“The Content of the Psychoses”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Know all the theories, master all the techniques, but as you touch a human soul be just another human soul.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Out of evil, much good has come to me. By keeping quiet, repressing nothing, remaining attentive, and by accepting reality – taking things as they are, and not as I wanted them to be – by doing all this, unusual knowledge has come to me, and unusual powers as well, such as I could never have imagined before.
I always thought that when we accepted things they overpowered us in some way or other. This turns out not to be true at all, and it is only by accepting them that one can assume and attitude towards them.
So now I intend to play the game of life, being receptive to whatever comes to me, good and bad, sun and shadow forever alternating, and, in this way, also accepting my own nature with its positive and negative sides. Thus everything becomes more alive to me.
What a fool I was! How I tried to force everything to go according to way I thought it ought to.
an ex patient of Carl Gustav Jung (Alchemical Studies, pg 47)”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“We have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“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, 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.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Man cannot stand a meaningless life.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer, for otherwise I am dependent upon the world’s answer.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Explore daily the will of God.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Whatever we look at, and however we look at it, we see only through our own eyes.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Every transformation demands as its precondition “the ending of a world”-the collapse of an old philosophy of life.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Space flights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because it is easier to go to Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one’s own being.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble…. They can never be solved, but only outgrown…. This ‘outgrowing’, as I formerly called it, on further experience was seen to consist in a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person’s horizon, and through this widening of view, the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life-tendency.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“I have always been impressed by the fact that there are a surprising number of individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and an equal number who do use their minds, but in an amazingly stupid way.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course—for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Psychological or spiritual development always requires a greater capacity for anxiety and ambiguity.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Astrology is assured of recognition from psychology, without further restrictions, because astrology represents the summation of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“We should know what our convictions are, and stand for them. Upon one’s own philosophy, conscious or unconscious, depends one’s ultimate interpretation of facts. Therefore it is wise to be as clear as possible about one’s subjective principles. As the man is, so will be his ultimate truth.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“One of the main functions of organized religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“I indignantly answered, “Do you call light what we men call the worst darkness? Do you call day night?”
To this my soul spoke a word that roused my anger, “My light is not of this world.”
I cried, “I know of no other world!”
The soul answered, “Should it not exist because you know nothing of it?”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Every man carries within himself the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definite feminine image. This image is fundamentally unconscious, a hereditary factor of primordial origin.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“But what will he do when he sees only too clearly why his patient is ill; when he sees that it arises from his having no love, but only sexuality; no faith, because he is afraid to grope in the dark; no hope, because he is disillusioned by the world and by life; and no understanding, because he has failed to read the meaning of his own existence?”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“In such doubtful matters, where you have to work as a pioneer, you must be able to put some trust in your intuition and follow your feeling even at the risk of going wrong.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it. It may help us to escape all criticism, we may even be able to deceive ourselves in the belief of our obvious righteousness. But deep down, below the surface of the average man’s conscience, he hears a voice whispering, ‘There is something not right,’ no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or by the moral code.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“One who looks outside, dreams. One who looks inside, awakens.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Intuition (is) perception via the unconscious”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“I am an orphan, alone: nevertheless I am found everywhere. I am one, but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“His retreat into himself is not a final renunciation of the world, but a search for quietude, where alone it is possible for him to make his contribution to the life of the community.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“We often dream about people from whom we receive a letter by the next post. I have ascertained on several occasions that at the moment when the dream occurred the letter was already lying in the post-office of the addressee.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his Notebooks: “It should not be hard for you to stop sometimes and look into the stains of walls, or ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud or like places in which … you may find really marvelous ideas.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Every individual needs revolution, inner division, overthrow of the existing order, and renewal, but not by forcing them upon his neighbors under the hypocritical cloak of Christian love or the sense of social responsibility or any of the other beautiful euphemisms for unconscious urges to personal power.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“My speech is imperfect. Not because I want to shine with words, but out of the impossibility of finding those words, I speak in images. With nothing else can I express the words from the depths.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“In each of us there is another whom we do not know.
(quoted in Incognito )”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Neurosis is the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“For two personalities to meet is like mixing two chemical substances: if there is any combination at all, both are transformed.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The achievement of psychological maturity is an individual task-and so is increasingly difficult today when man’s individuality is threatened by widespread conformity.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The life that I could still live, I should live, and the thoughts that I could still think, I should think.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“You open the gates of the soul to let the dark flood of chaos flow into your order and meaning. If you marry the ordered to the chaos you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning beyond meaning and meaninglessness.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“But, if you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The creative mind plays with the object it loves.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, “If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.” It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. Through him the distinction was clarified between myself and the object of my thought. He confronted me in an objective manner, and I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Man, as we realize if we reflect for a moment, never perceives anything fully or comprehends anything completely.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“What we do not make conscious emerges later as fate.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Nature has no use for the plea that one ‘did not know’.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The kernel of all jealousy is lack of love.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The doctor is effective only when he himself is affected. Only the wounded physician heals”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Naturally, society has an indisputable right to protect itself against arrant subjectivisms, but, in so far as society is itself composed of de-individualized human beings, it is completely at the mercy of ruthless individualists. Let it band together into groups and organizations as much as it likes – it is just this banding together and the resultant extinction of the individual personality that makes it succumb so readily to a dictator. A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hand of a single madman.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Every human life contains a potential. It that potential is not fulfilled, that life was wasted.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Synchronicity is the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that cannot be explained by cause and effect and that is meaningful to the observer.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The change of character brought about by the uprush of collective forces is amazing. A gentle and reasonable being can be transformed into a maniac or a savage beast. One is always inclined to lay the blame on external circumstances, but nothing could explode in us if it had not been there. As a matter of fact, we are constantly living on the edge of a volcano, and there is, so far as we know, no way of protecting ourselves from a possible outburst that will destroy everybody within reach. It is certainly a good thing to preach reason and common sense, but what if you have a lunatic asylum for an audience or a crowd in a collective frenzy? There is not much difference between them because the madman and the mob are both moved by impersonal, overwhelming forces.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“I deliberately and consciously give preference to a dramatic, mythological way of thinking and speaking, because this is not only more expressive but also more exact than an abstract scientific terminology, which is wont to toy with the notion that its theoretic formulations may one fine day be resolved into algebraic equations.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Fanaticism is always a sign of repressed doubt”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The sure path can only lead to death.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Everyone is in love with his own ideas”
― Carl Gustav Jung
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“Neurosis is the natural by-product of pain avoidance.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“I am not what happens to me. I choose who I become.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The time is a critical one, for it marks the beginning of the second half of life, when a metanoia, a mental transformation, not infrequently occurs.
(on being 36 yrs old)”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Everybody acts out a myth, but very few people know what their myth is. And you should know what your myth is because it might be a tragedy and maybe you dont want it to be.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Our mania for rational explanations obviously has its roots in our fear of metaphysics, for the two were always hostile brothers. Hence, anything unexpected that approaches us from the dark realm is regarded either as coming from outside and, therefore, as real, or else as a hallucination and, therefore, not true. The idea that anything could be real or true which does not come from outside has hardly begun to dawn on contemporary man.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Every step closer to my soul excites the scornful laughter of my devils, those cowardly ear-whisperers and poison-mixers.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“It seems to be very hard for people to live with riddles or to let them live, although one would think that life is so full of riddles as it is that a few more things we cannot answer would make no difference. But perhaps it is just this that is so unendurable, that there are irrational things in our own psyche which upset the conscious mind in its illusory certainties by confronting it with the riddle of its existence.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposite halves.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“If you go to thinking take your heart with you. If you go to love, take your head with you. Love is empty without thinking, thinking hollow without love.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“I am a symbol of my soul.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“God has fallen out of containment in religion and into human hearts—God is incarnating. Our whole unconscious is in an uproar from the God Who wants to know and to be known.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“It is under all circumstances an advantage to be in full possession of one’s personality, otherwise the repressed elements will only crop up as a hindrance elsewhere, not just at some unimportant point, but at the very spot where we are most sensitive. If people can be educated to see the shadow-side of their nature clearly, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more self-knowledge can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“As long as you are not conscious of your self you can live; but if you become conscious of your self you fall from one grave into another. All your rebirths could ultimately make you sick. The Buddha therefore finally gave up on rebirth, for he had had enough of crawling through all human and animal forms. After all the rebirths you still remain the lion crawling on the earth, the Chameleon, a caricature, one prone to changing colors, a crawling shimmering lizard, but precisely not a lion, whose nature is related to the sun, who draws his power from within himself who does not crawl around in the protective colors of the environment, and who does not defend himself by going into hiding. I recognized the chameleon and no longer want to crawl on the earth and change colors and be reborn; instead I want to exist from my own force, like the sun which gives light and does not suck light.
That belongs to the earth. I recall my solar nature and would like to rush to my rising. But ruins stand in my way They say: ‘With regard to men you should be this or that.’ My chameleonesque skin shudders. They obtrude upon me and want to color me. But that should no longer be. Neither good nor evil shall be my masters. I push them aside, the laughable survivors, and go on my way again, which leads me to the East. The quarreling powers that for so long stood between me and myself lie behind me.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Much of the evil in this world is due to the fact that man, in general, is hopelessly unconscious.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“… we are so full of apprehensions, fears, that we don’t know exactly to what it points… a great change of our psychoglocal attitude is imminent, that is certain…because we need more
understanding of human nature because …the only real danger that exists is man himself… and we know nothing of man – his
psyche should be studied because we are the origin of all coming evil…”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once and cannot add up the sum.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The years… when I pursued the inner images were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything was then.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“I myself found a fascinating example of this in Nietzsche’s book Thus Spake Zarathustra, where the author reproduces almost word for word an incident reported in a ship’s log for the year 1686. By sheer chance I had read this seaman’s yarn in a book published about 1835 (half a century before Nietzsche wrote); and when I found the similar passage in Thus Spake Zarathustra, I was struck by its peculiar style, which was different from Nietzsche’s usual language. I was convinced that Nietzsche must also have seen the old book, though he made no reference to it. I wrote to his sister, who was still alive, and she confirmed that she and her brother had in fact read the book together when he was 11 years old. I think, from the context, it is inconceivable that Nietzsche had any idea that he was plagiarizing this story. I believe that fifty years later it has unexpectedly slipped into focus in his conscious mind.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“To be “normal” is a splendid ideal for the unsuccessful,”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Man becomes whole, integrated, calm, fertile, and happy when (and only when) the process of individuation is complete, when the conscious and the unconscious have learned to live at peace and to complement one another.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The world will ask who you are, and if you do not know, the world will tell you.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“But there is no energy unless there is a tension of opposites; hence it is necessary to discover the opposite to the attitude of the conscious mind.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. He is already on the way; he is like Mohammad. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with wild god. That can be the historic future.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“That which compels us to create a substitute for ourselves is not the external lack of objects, but our incapacity to lovingly include a thing outside of ourselves”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“INTUITION (L. intueri, ‘to look at or into’). I regard intuition as a basic psychological function (q.v.). It is the function that mediates perceptions in an unconscious way. Everything, whether outer or inner objects or their relationships, can be the focus of this perception. The peculiarity of intuition is that it is neither sense perception, nor feeling, nor intellectual inference, although it may also appear in these forms. In intuition a content presents itself whole and complete, without our being able to explain or discover how this content came into existence. Intuition is a kind of instinctive apprehension, no matter of what contents. Like sensation (q.v.), it is an irrational (q.v.) function of perception. As with sensation, its contents have the character of being “given,” in contrast to the “derived” or “produced” character of thinking and feeling (qq.v.) contents. Intuitive knowledge possesses an intrinsic certainty and conviction, which enabled Spinoza (and Bergson) to uphold the scientia intuitiva as the highest form of knowledge. Intuition shares this quality with sensation (q.v.), whose certainty rests on its physical foundation. The certainty of intuition rests equally on a definite state of psychic “alertness” of whose origin the subject is unconscious.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The statistical method shows the facts in the light of the ideal average but does not give us a picture of their empirical reality. While reflecting an indisputable aspect of reality, it can falsify the actual truth in a most misleading way. This is particularly true of theories which are based on statistics. The distinctive thing about real facts, however, is their individuality. Not to put too fine a point on it, once could say that the real picture consists of nothing but exceptions to the rule, and that, in consequence, absolute reality has predominantly the character of irregularity.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest. Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Whether you call the principle of existence “God,” “matter,” “energy,” or anything else you like, you have created nothing; you have merely changed a symbol.
Eastern and Western Thinking, 1938”
― Carl Gustave Jung
“If you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences—and infer the motivation.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light. Once one has experienced a few times what it is like to stand judgingly between the opposites, one begins to understand what is meant by the self. Anyone who perceives his shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Depression is like a woman in black. If she turns up, don’t shoo her away. Invite her in, offer her a seat, treat her like a guest and listen to what she wants to say.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“I feel it is the duty of one who goes his own way to inform society of what he finds on his voyage of discovery.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“We are the great danger. Psyche is the great danger. How important is to know something about it, but we know nothing about it.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“It is only the things we don’t understand that have any meaning. Man woke up in a world he did not understand, and that is why he tries to interpret it.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“The dream shows the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as he would like it to be, but as it is.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“Happiness and contentment, equability of mind and meaningfulness of life – these can be experienced only by the individual and not by a State, which, on the one hand, is nothing but a convention agreed to by independent individuals, and on the other, continually threatens to paralyse and suppress the individual.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“What is not brought to consciousness, comes to us as fate.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
