Carl Jung Quotes

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.

Individuation is to divest the self of false wrappings.

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.

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.

Without freedom there can be no morality.

To be normal is the ultimate aim of the unsuccessful.

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.

Whenever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator state, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units.

Healing proceeds from the depths to the heights.

The unconscious is the unwritten history of mankind from time unrecorded.

I am the triple owner of the world, the finest Turkey, the Lorelei, Germania and Helvetia of exclusively sweet butter and Naples, and I must supply the whole world with macaroni.

A 'scream' is always just that - a noise and not music.

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

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

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.

Whatever is not conscious will be experienced as fate.

I believe that history is capable of anything. There exists no folly that men have not tried out.

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

I cannot prove to you that God exists, but my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern in the individual has at its disposal the greatest transforming energies of which life is capable. Find this pattern in your own individual self and life is transformed.

The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm which is not easily disturbed, or else a brokenness that can hardly be healed. Conversely, it is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed in order to produce valuable and lasting results.

Words are animals, alive with a will of their own

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.

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.

I want to be freed neither from human beings, nor from myself, nor from nature; for all these appear to me the greatest of miracles.

Doesn't the world bring forth thinking in human heads with the same necessity that it brings forth blossoms on the plant?

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!

Continuous creation is to be thought of not only as a series of successive acts of creation, but also as the eternal presence of the one creative act.

It is only through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious. We cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities. Both are border-line concepts for transcendental contents. But empirically it can be established, with a sufficient degree of probability, that there is in the unconscious an archetype of wholeness.

What we do not make conscious emerges later as fate.

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

The word 'belief' is a difficult thing for me. I don't believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it - I don't need to believe it.

Self-reflection, or - what comes to the same thing - the urge to individuation, gathers together what is scattered and multifarious and exalts it to the original of the One, the Primordial Man. In this way our existence as separate beings, our former ego nature, is abolished, the circle of consciousness is widened, and because the paradoxes have been made conscious, the sources of conflict are dried up.

To confront a person with their own shadow is to show them their own light.

We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.

Nights through dreams tell the myths forgotten by the day.

Every victory contains the germ of future defeat.

How else could it have occurred to man to divide the cosmos, on the analogy of day and night, summer and winter, into a bright day-world and a dark night-world peopled with fabulous monsters, unless he had the prototype of such a division in himself, in the polarity between the conscious and the invisible and unknowable unconscious?

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

Not only does the psyche exist, but it is existence itself. It is an almost absurd prejudice to suppose that existence can only be physical...We might well say, on the contrary, that physical existence is a mere inference, since we know of matter only in so far as we perceive psychic images mediated by the senses.

I cannot define for you what God is. I can only say that my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern has at its disposal the greatest of all his energies for transformation and transfiguration of his natural being. Not only the meaning of his life but his renewal and his institutions depend on his conscious relationship with this pattern of his collective unconscious.

Whereas I formerly believed it to be my bounden duty to call other persons to order, I now admit that I need calling to order myself.

Consciousness succumbs all too easily to unconscious influences, and these are often truer and wiser than our conscious thinking.

The principle aim of psychotherapy is not to transport one to an impossible state of happiness, but to help (the client) acquire steadfastness and patience in the face of suffering.

The secret of artistic creation and the effectiveness of art is to be found in a return to the state of 'participation mystique' - to that level of experience at which it is man who lives, and not the individual.

Hitler is a medicine man type of leader.

I hold the view that the alchemist’s hope of conjuring out of matter the philosophical gold, or the panacea, or the wonderful stone, was only in part an illusion, an effect of projection; for the rest it corresponded to certain psychic facts that are of great importance in the psychology of the unconscious. As is shown by the texts and their symbolism, the alchemist projected what I have called the process of individuation into the phenomena of chemical change.

Every human life contains a potential, if that potential is not fulfilled, then that life was wasted.

I cannot love anyone if I hate myself. That is the reason why we feel so extremely uncomfortable in the presence of people who are noted for their special virtuousness, for they radiate an atmosphere of the torture they inflict on themselves. That is not a virtue but a vice.