Carl Jung Quotes (202) Spiritual Sayings
About the Author: Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychotherapist and psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology. Jung proposed and developed the concepts of the extraverted and the introverted personality, archetypes, and the collective unconscious. His work has been influential in psychiatry and in the study of religion, literature, and related fields. Jung created some of the best known psychological concepts, including the archetype, the collective unconscious, the complex, and synchronicity. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a popular psychometric instrument, has been developed from Jung's theories. Jung saw the human psyche as "by nature religious", and made this religiousness the focus of his explorations. Jung is one of the best known contemporary contributors to dream analysis and symbolization. Though he was a practicing clinician and considered himself to be a scientist, much of his life's work was spent exploring tangential areas, including Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, and sociology, as well as literature and the arts. His interest in philosophy and the occult led many to view him as a mystic. See website for more info - http://www.cgjungpage.org/
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“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
― C.G. Jung
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
― C.G. Jung
“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
― C.G. Jung
“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
― C.G. Jung
“You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.”
― C.G. Jung
“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.”
― C.G. Jung
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
― C.G. Jung
“Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.”
― C.G. Jung
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”
― C.G. Jung
“Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.”
― C.G. Jung
“There's no coming to consciousness without pain.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.”
― C.G. Jung
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
― C.G. Jung
“Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event.”
― C.G. 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. ”
― C.G. Jung
“The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents.”
― C.G. Jung
“Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.”
― C.G. Jung
“We cannot change anything unless we accept it.”
― C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
“Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“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. ”
― C.G. Jung
“The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“Every human life contains a potential, if that potential is not fulfilled, then that life was wasted...”
― C.G. 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. ”
― C.G. Jung
“Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion”
― C.G. Jung
“Shame is a soul eating emotion.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“...anyone who attempts to do both, to adjust to his group and at the same time pursue his individual goal, becomes neurotic.”
― C.G. Jung
“Nobody, as long as he moves among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“The true leader is always led.”
― C.G. Jung
“Nights through dreams tell the myths forgotten by the day.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“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.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“Words are animals, alive with a will of their own”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“When an inner situation is not made conscious it appears outside as fate.”
― C.G. 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?”
― C.G. Jung
“I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
“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.”
― C.G. Jung
“With a truly tragic delusion,” Carl 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“What you resist, persists”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them.”
― C.G. Jung
“My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“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.”
― C.G. Jung
“The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole.”
― C.G. 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)”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.”
― C.G. Jung
“Explore daily the will of God.”
― C.G. Jung
“There is no coming to consciousness without pain. 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.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols
“Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.”
― C.G. Jung
“It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“Faith, hope, love, and insight are the highest achievements of human effort. They are found-given-by experience.”
― C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
“The gods have become our diseases.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. 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?”
― C.G. Jung
“I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
“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.”
― C.G. Jung
“With a truly tragic delusion,” Carl 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“What you resist, persists”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them.”
― C.G. Jung
“My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“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.”
― C.G. Jung
“The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole.”
― C.G. 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)”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.”
― C.G. Jung
“Explore daily the will of God.”
― C.G. Jung
“There is no coming to consciousness without pain. 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.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols
“Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.”
― C.G. Jung
“It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“Faith, hope, love, and insight are the highest achievements of human effort. They are found-given-by experience.”
― C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
“The gods have become our diseases.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“We are not what happened to us,
we are what we wish to become.”
― C.G. 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”
― C.G. Jung, The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease
“You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
“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.”
― C.G. Jung
“Sometimes you have to do something unforgivable just to be able to go on living.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering”
― C.G. Jung
“Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality.”
― C.G. Jung
“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
― C.G. Jung
“For two personalities to meet is like mixing two chemical substances: if there is any combination at all, both are transformed.”
― C.G. Jung, Psychological Reflections: A New Anthology of His Writings 1905-61
“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.”
― C.G. 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”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.”
― C.G. 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”
― C.G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation
“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.”
― C.G. Jung
“In each of us there is another whom we do not know.”
― C.G. Jung
“Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.”
― C.G. Jung
“The Wrong we have Done, Thought, or Intended Will wreak its Vengeance on
Our SOULS.”
― C.G. Jung
“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”
― C.G. Jung
“There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in theyear'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.”
― C.G. 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?”
― C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
“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.”
― C.G. Jung
“A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon.”
― C.G. Jung
“The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”
― C.G. Jung
“The sure path can only lead to death.”
― C.G. Jung
“Nature has no use for the plea that one 'did not know'.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“What we do not make conscious emerges later as fate.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“For better to come, good must stand aside.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. 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)”
― C.G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation
“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.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately springs as a gigantic summation from these hidden source in individuals.”
― C.G. Jung
“Intuition does not denote something contrary to reason, but something outside of the province of reason.”
― C.G. Jung
“Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.”
― C.G. Jung
“Neurosis is the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.”
― C.G. Jung
“The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.
Carl Jung
Swiss psychologist (1875 - 1961)”
― C.G. Jung
“We have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.”
― C.G. Jung
“Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists... But 'the heart glows,' and a secret unrest gnaws at the roots of our being.”
― C.G. Jung
“Creative power is mightier than its possessor.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“Astrology is assured of recognition from psychology, without further restrictions, because astrology represents the summation of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity.”
― C.G. Jung
“"...the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”
― C.G. Jung
“Image is psyche.”
― C.G. Jung
“How difficult it is to reach anything approaching a moderate and relatively calm point of view in the midst of one's emotions.”
― C.G. Jung, Essays on Contemporary Events: 1936-46
“I am not what happens to me. I choose who I become.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle
“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.”
― C.G. Jung
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to a better understanding of ourselves”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“I have gradually learned to be cautious even in disbelief”
― C.G. Jung
“The serious problems in life...are never fully solved. If ever they should appear to be so it is a sure sign that something has been lost. The meaning and purpose of a problem seem to lie not in its solution but in our working at it incessantly.”
― C.G. Jung
“...it seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making. I wnt about with all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they were patients and I was analyzing them. I read a Greek or Negro myth as if a lunatic were telling me his anamnesis.”
― C.G. Jung, Analytical Psychology, Its Theory and Practice: The Tavistock Lectures
“A true symbol appears only when there is a need to express what thought cannot think or what is only divined or felt.”
― C.G. Jung
“If the demand for self-knowledge is willed by fate and is refused, this negative attitude may end in real death. The demand would not have come to this person had he still been able to strike out on some promising by-path. But he is caught in a blind alley from which only self-knowledge can extricate him. If he refuses this then no other way is left open to him. Usually he is not conscious of his situation, either, and the more unconscious he is the more he is at the mercy of unforeseen dangers: he cannot get out of the way of a car quickly enough, in climbing a mountain he misses his foothold somewhere, out skiing he thinks he can negotiate a tricky slope, and in an illness he suddenly loses the courage to live. The unconscious has a thousand ways of snuffing out a meaningless existence with surprising swiftness.”
― C.G. Jung
“The psychopathology of the masses is rooted in the psychology of the individual”
― C.G. Jung, Essays on Contemporary Events: 1936-46
“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”
― C.G. Jung
“Your vision will become clear only when you look into yor heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.”
― C.G. 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...”
― C.G. Jung
“When you succeed in awakening the Kundalini, so that it starts to move out of its mere potentiality, you necessarily start a world which is totally different from our world. It is the world of eternity.”
― C.G. Jung
“I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it.”
― C.G. Jung
“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul.”
― C.G. Jung
“One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung, The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings
“Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.”
― C.G. Jung
“Neurosis is the natural by-product of pain avoidance.”
― C.G. Jung
“If you think along the lines of Nature then you think properly."
from the video "Carl Jung speaks about death”
― C.G. Jung
“One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is.”
― C.G. Jung
“Our heart glows, and secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. Dealing with the unconscious has become a question of life for us.”
― C.G. Jung
“The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.”
― C.G. Jung
“To make what fate intends for me my own intention”
― C.G. Jung
“All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.”
― C.G. Jung
“When religion stops talking about animals it will be all downhill.”
― C.G. Jung
“A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.”
― C.G. Jung
“After all, there was nothing preposterous and world-shaking in the idea that there might be events which overstepped the limited categories of space, time, and causality. Animals were known to sense beforehand storms and earthquakes. There were dreams which foresaw the death of certain persons, clocks which stopped at the moment of death, glasses which shattered at the critical moment. All these things had been taken for granted in the world of my childhood. And now I was apparently the only person who had ever heard of them. In all earnestness I asked myself what kind of world I had stumbled into. Plainly, the urban world knew nothing about the country world, the real world of mountains, woods and rivers, of animals and ‘God’s thoughts’ (plants and crystals). I found this explanation comforting. At all events, it bolstered my self-esteem.”
― C.G. Jung
“We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“That which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate”
― C.G. Jung
“Not the criticism of individual contemporaries will decide the truth or falsity of these discoveries, but future generations. There are things that are not yet true today, perhaps we dare not find them true, but tomorrow they may be. So every man whose fate it is to go his individual way must proceed with hopefulness and watchfulness, ever conscious of his loneliness and its dangers.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.”
― C.G. Jung
“Intuition (is) perception via the unconscious”
― C.G. Jung
“Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next.”
― C.G. Jung
“Man is much more the victim of his psychic constitution than its inventor.”
― C.G. Jung
“Freedom of will is the ability to do gladly that which I must do.”
― C.G. Jung
“I don't aspire to be a good man. I aspire to be a whole man.”
― C.G. Jung
“We can keep from a child all knowledge of earlier myths, but we cannot take from him the need for mythology.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
“Scientific education is based in the main on statistical truths and abstract knowledge and therefore imparts an unrealistic, rational picture of the world, in which the individual, as a merely marginal phenomenon, plays no role. The individual, however, as an irrational datum, is the true and authentic carrier of reality, the concrete man as opposed to the unreal ideal or “normal” man to whom the scientific statements refer.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
“Apart from the agglomeration of huge masses in which the individual disappears anyway, one of the chief factors responsible for psychological mass-mindedness is scientific rationalism, which robs the individual of his foundations and his dignity. As a social unit he has lost his individuality and become a mere abstract number in the bureau of statistics. He can only play the role of an interchangeable unit of infinitesimal importance. Looked at rationally and from outside, that is exactly what he is, and from this point of view it seems positively absurd to go on talking about the value or meaning of the individual.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
“Only in the first hour of the night can I become human, while the male dove is busy with the twelve dead.'
--Black Book 2”
― C.G. Jung
“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being”
― C.G. Jung
“In studying the history of the human mind one is impressed again and again by the fact that the growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and that each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement. One could almost say that nothing is more hateful to man than to give up even a particle of his unconsciousness. Ask those who have tried to introduce a new idea!”
― C.G. Jung
“Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.”
― C.G. Jung
“The creative mind plays with the object it loves.”
― C.G. Jung
“I could not say I believe. I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God.”
― C.G. Jung
“Only what is really oneself has the power to heal.”
― C.G. Jung
“Everyone is in love with his own ideas”
― C.G. Jung
“Good advice" is often a doubtful remedy, but generally not dangerous because it has so little
effect......”
― C.G. Jung
“The infantile dream-state of the mass man is so unrealistic that he never thinks to ask who is paying for this paradise. The balancing of accounts is left to a higher political or social authority, which welcomes the task, for its power is thereby increased; and the more power it has, the weaker and more helpless the individual becomes.”
― C.G. Jung
"For the alchemist the one primarily in need of redemption is not man, but the deity who is lost and sleeping in matter. Only as a secondary consideration does he hope that some benefit may accrue to himself from the transformed substance as the panacea, the medicina catholica, just as it may to the imperfect bodies, the base or "sick" metals, etc. His attention is not directed to his own salvation through God's grace, but to the liberation of God from the darkness of matter.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung, Aion
“This formulation will not please the mass man or the collective believer. For the former the policy of the State is the supreme principle of thought and action. Indeed, this was the purpose for which he was enlightened, and accordingly the mass man grants the individual a right to exist only in so far as he is a function of the State. The believer, on the other hand, while admitting that the State has a moral and factual claim on him, confesses to the belief that not only man but the State that rules him is subject to the overlordship of “God,” and that, in case of doubt, the supreme decision will be made by God and not by the State.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
“Words like “Society” and “State” are so concretized that they are almost personified. In the opinion of the man in the street, the “State,” far more than any king in history, is the inexhaustible giver of all good; the “State” is invoked, made responsible, grumbled at, and so on and so forth. Society is elevated to the rank of a supreme ethical principle; indeed, it is even credited with positively creative capacities.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
“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.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
“Funnily enough, “self-criticism” is an idea much in vogue in Marxist countries, but there it is subordinated to ideological considerations and must serve the State, and not truth and justice in men’s dealing with one another. The mass State has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual. The more unrelated individuals are, the more consolidated the State becomes, and vice versa.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
“What is not brought to consciousness, comes to us as fate.”
― C.G. Jung
“Abraham Lincoln has crossed my path, when I was a little boy in school. He was pointed out to the schoolchildren as the model of a citizen, who has devoted his life to the welfare of his country—very much in the same way as those great men – bene meriti de patria – of the Roman republic and the Greek polis. Thus Abraham Lincoln has remained since my early days one of the shining stars in the assembly of immortal heroes. Is there greater fame than to be removed to the timeless sphere of mythical existence?”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“Not your thinking, but your being, is distinctiveness. Therefore not after difference,
ye think it, must ye strive; but after YOUR OWN BEING. At bottom, therefore, there is only one striving, namely, the striving after your own being.”
― C.G. Jung, Septem Sermones ad Mortuos
“The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.”
― C.G. Jung
“A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.”
― C.G. Jung
“Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories dreams and reflections
“The more one sees of human fate and the more one examines its secret springs of action, the more one is impressed by the strength of unconscious motives and by the limitations of free choice”
― C.G. Jung
“The man who promises everything is sure to fulfil nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition.”
― C.G. Jung
“But, if you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself.”
― C.G. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“Man's task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.”
― C.G. Jung
“Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes”
― C.G. Jung
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