Carl Jung Quotes

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

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

Creativity is the art that can give rise to visionary metaphorical relationships, as opposed to purely psy-chological ones.

New ideas are not only the enemies of old ones; they also appear often in an extremely unacceptable form.

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

The only thing that really matters now is whether man can climb up to a higher moral level, to a higher plane of consciousness, in order to be equal to the superhuman powers which the fallen angels have played into his hands. But he can make no progress until he becomes very much better acquainted with his own nature.

The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor naked heathen, but the spiritual heathen who populate Europe have as yet heard nothing of Christianity.

The general function of dreams is to try to restore our psychological balance by producing dream material that re-establishes, in a subtle way, the total psychic equilibrium.

In the products of the unconscious we discover mandala symbols, that is, circular and quaternity figures which express wholeness, and whenever we wish to express wholeness, we employ just such figures.

Creative power is mightier than its possessor.

True art is creation, and creation is beyond all theories. That is why I say to any beginner: Learn your theories as well as you can, but put them aside when you touch the miracle of the living soul. Not theories but your own creative individuality alone must decide.

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

I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished.

Once upon a time men were possessed by devils. Now they are not less obsessed by ideas

The primordial image, or archetype, is a figure--be it a daemon, a human being, or a process--that constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. . . . In each of these images there is a little piece of human psychology and human fate, a remnant of the joys and sorrows that have been repeated countless times in our ancestral history. . . .

To me dreams are part of nature, which harbors no intention to deceive but expresses something as best it can.

Obviously astrology has much to offer psychology, but what the latter can offer its elder sister is less evident. So far as I judge, it would seem to me advantageous for astrology to take the existence of psychology into account, above all the psychology of the personality and of the unconscious.

No matter what the world thinks about religious experience, the one who has it possesses a great treasure, a thing that has become for him a source of life, meaning, and beauty, and that has given a new splendor to the world and to mankind.

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

I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole.

I do not believe...I know.

I had to make a confession of faith in stone. That was the beginning of the tower, the house I built for myself at Bollingen.

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

Sometimes you have to do something unforgivable just to be able to go on living.

Intuition (is) perception via the unconscious

The divine process of change manifests itself to our human understanding . . . as punishment, torment, death, and transfiguration.

If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance towards oneself 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.

A book of mine is always a matter of fate. There is something unpredictable about the process of writing, and I cannot prescribe for myself any predetermined course.

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.

Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.

Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfill the way that is in you.

Modern man is battered by the fundamental forces of his own psyche.

All art intuitively apprehends coming changes in the collective unconsciousness.

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order... we are caught and entangled in aimless experience... Only when all props and crutches are broken, and no cover from the rear offers even the slightest hope of security, does it become possible for us to experience an archetype that up till then had lain hidden behind the meaningful nonsense played out by the anima. This is the archetype of meaning, just as the anima is the archetype of life itself.

We know that the wildest and most moving dramas are played not in the theatre but in the hearts of ordinary men and women.

The Shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance. Indeed, self-knowledge as a psychotherapuetic measure frequently requires much painstaking work extending over a long period of time.

Like the sea itself, the unconscious yields an endless and self-replenishing abundance of creatures, a wealth beyond our fathoming.

The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.

Man's task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.

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

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

The unconscious wants to flow into consciousness in order to reach the light, but at the same time it continually thwarts itself, because it would rather remain unconscious. That is to say, God wants to become man, but not quite.

So they speak soothingly about progress and the greatest possible happiness, forgetting that happiness is itself poisoned if the measure of suffering has not been fulfilled.

Life is crazy and meaningful at once.

The Self then functions as a union of opposites and thus constitutes the most immediate experience of the Divine which it is psychologically possible to imagine

I use [Heraclitus' discovery of] enantiodromia for the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time. This characteristic phenomenon practically always occurs when an extreme, onesided tendency dominates conscious life; in time an equally powerful counterposition is built up, which first inhibits the conscious performance and subsequently breaks through the conscious control.

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

Life is teleology par excellence; it is the intrinsic striving towards a goal, and the living organism is a system of directed aims which seek to fulfill themselves.