Carl Jung Quotes

What was given to us by the past is adapted to the possibilities of the future.

Whenever we touch nature we get clean. People who have got dirty through too much civilization take a walk in the woods, or a bath in the sea. Entering the unconscious, entering yourself through dreams, is touching nature from the inside and this is the same thing, things are put right again.

The greatest sin is to be unconscious.

The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.

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.

The inner man has access to the sense organs of god.

The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

The meaning and design of a problem seem not to lie in its solution, but in our working at it incessantly.

The ability to ask questions is the greatest resource in learning the truth.

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

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.

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.

Synchronistic phenomena prove the simultaneous occurrence of meaningful equivalences in heterogenous, causally unrelated processes; in other words, they prove that a content perceived by an observer can, at the same time, be represented by an outside event, without any causal connection. From this it follows either that the psyche cannot be localized in time, or that space is relative to the psyche.

Fidelity to the law of your own being is an act of high courage flung in the face of life.

Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.

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

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

Warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.

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

Criticism can be effective when there is something that must be destroyed or dissolved, but it is capable only of harm when there is something to be built.

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.

The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things.

Even a lie is a psychic fact.

The world will ask you who you are, and if you don't know, the world will tell you.

To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real.

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

Commendation heals; condemnation destroys.

...The unconscious has no time. There is no trouble about time in the unconscious. Part of our psyche is not in time and not in space. They are only an illusion, time and space, and so in a certain part of our psyche time does not exist at all.

One must be able to let things happen.

Active imagination requires a state of reverie, half-way between sleep and waking.

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.

Nature does not deceive or conceal, but reveals.

The Wrong we have Done, Thought, or Intended Will wreak its Vengeance on Our SOULS.

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

We discover ourselves through others.

The only important thing is to follow nature. A tiger should be a good tiger; a tree, a good tree. So people should be people. But to know what people are, one must follow nature and go alone, admitting the importance of the unexpected. Still, nothing is possible without love. . . . For love puts one in a mood to risk everything, and not to withhold important elements.

The upheaval of our world and the upheaval in consciousness is one and the same. Everything becomes relative and therefore doubtful. And while man, hesitant and questioning, contemplates... his spirit yearns for an answer that will allay the turmoil of doubt and uncertainty.

Error is just as important a condition of life's progress as truth

We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos - the right moment - for a 'metamorphosis of the gods', of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing.

In all earnestness I asked myself what kind of world I had stumbled into.

The healthy man does not torture others.

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.

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.

I think it is better for all people to live on, to look forward to the next stage (after death), as if he had to spend centuries, then he lives properly... looking forward to the great adventure ahead, then he lives!

Since psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another and ultimately rest on irrepresentable, transcendental factors, it is not only possible but fairly probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of the same thing.

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.

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

Yahweh [God] must become man precisely because he has done man a wrong. He, the guardian of justice, knows that every wrong must be expiated, and Wisdom knows that moral law is above even him. Because his creature has surpassed him he must regenerate himself