Quotes by Carl Jung

Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.

Nothing is possible without love.

Modern man is sick because he is not whole.

The creative mind plays with the object it loves.

Becoming conscious is of course a sacrilege against nature; it is as though you had robbed the unconscious of something.

Where your fear is, there is your task.

The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

Dealing with the unconscious has become a question of life for us.

There is no light without shadow, and no psychic wholeness without imperfection.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances. If there is any reaction, both are transformed.

Healing comes only from that which leads the patient beyond himself and beyond his entanglements with ego.

Healing proceeds from the depths to the heights.

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart . Who looks inside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole.

Every psychic advance of man arises from the suffering of the soul.

Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.

A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.

What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits.

My evenings are taken up very largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth.

We want to have certainties and no doubts- results and no experiments- without even seeing that certainties can arise only through doubt and results only thorough experiment.

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.

Never diagnose a (client) until after their therapy is over.

The squaring of the circle is a stage on the way to the unconscious, a point of transition leading to a goal lying as yet unformulated beyond it. It is one of those paths to the centre.

For, in order to turn the individual into a function of the State, his dependence on anything beside the State must be taken from him.

Most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us.

Blind acceptance never leads to a solution; at best it leads only to a standstill and is paid for heavily in the next generation.

Our intellect has achieved the most tremendous things, but in the meantime our spiritual dwelling has fallen into disrepair.

One of the main functions of formalized religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God.

God enters through the wound.

A criminal becomes a popular figure because he unburdens in no small degree the consciences of his fellow man, for now they know once more where evil is to be found.

If only simplicity were not the most difficult of all things. It consists of watching objectively the development of any fragment of fantasy.

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.

Insight that dawns slowly seems to me to have more lasting effects than a fitful idealism, which is unlikely to hold out for long.

One cannot live without inconsistency.

The individual disposition is already a factor in childhood; it is innate, and not acquired in the course of a life.

Man is in need if a symbolical life- badly in need. We only live banal, ordinary, rational or irrational things- but we have no symbolic life. Where do we live symbolically? Nowhere except where we participate in the ritual of life.

If there is a fear of falling, the only safety consists in deliberately jumping.

Liverpool is the pool of life, it makes to live.

A collection of a hundred great brains makes one big fathead.

The fact is that certain ideas exist almost everywhere and at all times and can even spontaneously create themselves quite independently of migration and tradition.

Man is the microcosm of the macrocosm ; the God on earth is built on the pattern of the God in nature. But the universal consciousness of the real Ego transcends a million fold the self-consciousness of the personal for false ego.

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.

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.

The most important question anyone can ask is: What myth am I living?

Consciousness can keep only a few images in full clarity at one time, and even this clarity fluctuates.

We can keep from a child all knowledge of earlier myths, but we cannot take from him the need for mythology.

It is on the whole probably that we continually dream, but that consciousness makes such a noise that we do not hear it.

Neurosis is the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.

Recognition of the reality of evil necessarily relativizes the good, and the evil likewise, converting both into halves of a paradoxical whole.

Science...is part and parcel of our knowledge and obscures our insight only when it holds that the understanding given by it is the only kind there is.

Our biggest problems cannot be resolved. They must be outgrown.

All neurotics seek the religious.

In the child, consciousness rises out of the depths of unconscious psychic life, at first like separate islands, which gradually unite to form a 'continent,' a continuous landmass of consciousness. Progressive mental development means, in effect, extension of consciousness.

Psychiatrists classify a person as neurotic if he suffers from his problems in living, and a psychotic if he makes others suffer.

People are never helped in their suffering by what they think for themselves, but only by revelation of a wisdom greater than their own. It is this which lifts them out of their distress.

Where do we live symbolically? Nowhere except where we participate in the ritual of life.

Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality.

There was need of a phantastic, indestructible optimism, and one far removed from all sense of reality, in order, for example, to discover in the shameful death of Christ really the highest salvation and the redemption of the world.

No dream symbol can be separated from the individual who dreams it, and there is no definite or straightforward interpretation of any dream.

As a plant produces its flower, so the psyche creates its symbols.

Science has destroyed even the refuge of the inner life. What was once a sheltering haven has become a place of terror.

The greatest sin is to be unconscious.

Much of the evil in the world is due to the fact that man in general is hopelessly unconscious.

Nothing worse could happen to one than to be completely understood.

But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life's morning -- for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.

Only the wounded physician heals.

Man's unconscious... contains all the patterns of life and behaviour inherited from his ancestors, so that every human child, prior to consciousness, is possessed of a potential system of adapted psychic functioning.

An old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as the young man who is unable to embrace it.

The descent into the depths always seems to precede the ascent.

Our blight is ide­olo­gies -- they are the long-expected Antichrist!

Securities, certitudes and peace do not lead to discoveries.

No concept is a carrier of life.

Neurosis is an inner cleavage-the state of being at war with oneself.

A complex is a cluster of energy in the unconscious, charged by historic events, reinforced through repitition, embodying a fragment of our personality, and generating a programmed response and an implicit set of expectations.

We must be able to let things happen in the psyche. For us, this becomes a real art... Consciousness is forever interfering, helping, correcting, and negating, never leaving the single growth of the psychic processes in peace.

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.

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 interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance.

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

I am this bundle of what has been, and what has been accomplished.

The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution born anew in the brain structure of every individual.

The world of gods and spirits is truly 'nothing but' the collective unconscious inside me.

Psychological type is nothing static -- it changes in the course of life.

Creative powers can just as easily turn out to be destructive. It rests solely with the moral personality whether they apply themselves to good things or to bad. And if this is lacking, no teacher can supply it or take its place.

Protection and security are only valuable if they do not cramp life excessively.

How can anyone see straight when he does not see himself and the darkness he unconsciously carries with him into all his dealings?

While personal problems are not overlooked, the analyst keeps an eye on their symbolic aspects, for healing comes only from what leads the patient beyond himself and beyond his entanglement in the ego.

You must go in quest of yourself, and you will find yourself again only in the simple and forgotten things.

I have always said to my pupils: Learn as much as you can about symbolism; then forget it when you are analyzing a dream.

Conflicts create the fire of affects and emotions; and like every fire it has two aspects: that of burning and that of giving light.

The darkness which clings to every personality is the door into the unconscious and the gateway of dreams, from which those two twilight figures, the shadow and the anima, step into our nightly visions or, remaining invisible, take possession of our ego-consciousness.

It is a bewildering thing in human life that the things that cause the greatest fear is the source of the greatest wisdom.

Anyone who attempts to do both, to adjust to his group and at the same time pursue his individual goal, becomes neurotic.

My mandalas were cryptograms concerning the state of the self which was presented to me anew each day...I guarded them like precious pearls....It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the center. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the center, to individuation.

There are all too many who, on account of their notorious ineptitude, thrive better in a rationalist system than in freedom. Freedom is one of those difficult things.

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.

It is a common illusion to believe that what we know today is all we ever can know. Nothing is more vulnerable than scientific theory, which is an ephemeral attempt to explain facts and not an everlasting truth in itself.

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.

If you think along the lines of Nature then you think properly. from the video Carl Jung speaks about death.

Fortunately, in her kindness and patience, Nature has never put the fatal question as to the meaning of their lives into the mouths of most people. And where no one asks, no one needs to answer.

I came to Freud for facts. I read 'The Interpretation of Dreams' and I thought- 'Oh, here is a man who is not just theorizing away, here is a man who has got facts.'

One is always in the dark about one's own personality. One needs others to get to know oneself.

The unconscious psyche believes in life after death.

Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living.

If I accept the fact that a god is absolute and beyond all human experiences, he leaves me cold. I do not affect him, nor does he affect me. But if I know that a god is a powerful impulse in my soul, at once I must concern myself with him, for then he can become important.

Perhaps this sounds very simple, but simple things are always the most difficult. In actual life it requires the greatest discipline to be simple, and the acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook upon life.

The creative process is a living thing, implanted, as it were in the souls of men.

The judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth.

The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.

The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents.

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.

My interests drew me in different directions. On the one hand I was powerfully attracted by science, with its truths based on facts; on the other hand I was fascinated by everything to do with comparative religion. ... In science I missed the factor of meaning; and in religion, that of empiricism.

The gods have become our diseases.

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.

Even if the whole world were to fall to pieces, the unity of the psyche would never be shattered.

The longing for light is the longing for consciousness.

Too much of the animal disfigures the civilized human being, too much culture makes a sick animal.

The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual.

You can take away a man's gods, but only to give him others in return.

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.

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.

Freedom stretches only as far as the limits of our consciousness.

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.

We cannot imagine events that are connected non-causally and are capable of a non-causal explanation. But that does not mean that such events do not exist.

I had always been impressed by the fact that there are surprisingly many individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and yet are not stupid, and an equal number who obviously do use their minds but in an amazingly stupid way.

Nature has no use for the plea that one 'did not know'.

The sure path can only lead to death.

It is high time that we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to preach the art of seeing.

Mind and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing.

Man cannot stand a meaningless life.

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.

The whole nature of man presupposes woman, both physically and spiritually. His system is tuned into woman from the start, just as it is prepared for a quite definite world where there is water, light, air, salt, carbohydrates etc.

But the meaning of life is not ... explained by one's business life, nor is the deep desire of the human heart answered by a bank account.

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

We carry our past with us, to wit, the primitive and inferior man with his desires and emotions, and it is only with an enormous effort that we can detach ourselves from this burden. If it comes to a neurosis, we invariably have to deal with a considerably intensified shadow.

Our whole educational problem suffers from a one-sided approach to the child who is to be educated, and from an equally one-sided lack of emphasis on the uneducatedness of the educator.

The symbol in the dream has more the value of a parable: it does not conceal, it teaches.

Life is a luminous pause between two mysteries that are yet one.

Plato's world of ideas is beautiful.

So the lion is the law-breaker. Just as to the primitive man the lion is the lawbreaker, the great nuisance, dangerous to human beings and to animals, that breaks into the Kraal at night and fetches the bull out of the herd: he is the destructive instinct.

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

The psychopathology of the masses is rooted in the psychology of the individual.

The psychotherapist learns little or nothing from his successes. They mainly confirm him in his mistakes, while his failures, on the other hand, are priceless experiences in that they not only open up the way to a deeper truth, but force him to change his views and methods.

Gnosticism was stamped out completely and its remnants are so badly mangled that special study is needed to get any insight at all into its inner meaning.

For the alchemist the one primarily in need of redemption is not man, but the deity who is lost and sleeping in matter.

Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.

St. Thomas is really a great man quite apart from his saintliness.

The mind has grown to its present state of consciousness as an acorn grows into an oak, or as saurians developed into mammals.

There is a deep need in the world just now for guidance -- almost any sort of spiritual guidance.

You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.

Synchronicity reveals the meaningful connections between the subjective and objective world.

Wisdom accepts that all things have two sides.

The capacity for inner dialogue is a touchstone for outer objectivity.

A purely psychological explanation is ruled out... the discs show signs of intelligent guidance, by quasi-human pilots.

Ultimate truth, if there be such a thing, demands the concert of many voices.

The apparently unendurable conflict is proof of the rightness of your life. A life without contradiction is only half a life; or else a life in the Beyond, which is destined only for angels. But God loves human beings more than the angels.

The growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement.

In sleep, fantasy takes the form of dreams. But in waking life, too, we continue to dream beneath the threshold of consciousness, especially when under the influence of repressed or other unconscious complexes.

Seldom, or perhaps never, does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain.

It is only our deeds that reveal who we are.

In some way or other we are part of a single, all-embracing psyche, a single 'greatest man...'

Life calls us forth to independence, and anyone who does not heed this call because of childish laziness or timidity is threatened with neurosis. And once this has broken out, it becomes an increasingly valid reason for running away from life.

Complexes are psychic contents which are outside the control of the conscious mind. They have been split off from consciousness and lead a separate existence in the unconscious, being at all times ready to hinder or to reinforce the conscious intentions.

Not nature, but the genius of mankind, has knotted the hangman's noose with which it can execute itself at any moment.

Far from being a material world, this is a psychic world, which allows us to make only indirect and hypothetical inferences about the real nature of matter. The psychic, alone has immediate reality, and this includes all forms of the psychic, even.

Enlightenment consists not merely in the seeing of luminous shapes and visions, but in making the darkness visible. The latter procedure is more difficult and therefore, unpopular.

In thirty years I have treated many patients. Among all my patients in the second half of life, every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age had given their followers, and none of them was really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.

I readily admit that I have such a great respect for what happens in the human soul that I would be afraid of disturbing and distorting the silent operation of nature by clumsy interference.

Learn your techniques well and be prepared to let them go when you touch the human soul.

So often among so-called primitives one comes across spiritual personalities who immediately inspire respect, as though they were the fully matured products of an undisturbed fate.

The reason for such an unreasonable attitude with me is that I am not at all sure what will happen to me after death. I have good reasons to assume that things are not finished with death. Life seems to be an interlude in a long story.

Science is not ... a perfect instrument, but it is a superb and invaluable tool that works harm only when taken as an end in itself.

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.