Carl Jung Quotes

Life calls not for perfection, but for completeness.

To become acquainted with oneself is a terrible shock.

A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon.

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.

A sign is always less than the thing it points to, and a symbol is always more than we can understand at first sight. Therefore we stop at the sign but go on to the goal it indicates; but we remain with the symbol because it promises more than it reveals.

Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.

If God wishes to be born as man and to unite mankind in the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, He suffers the terrible torment of having to bear the world in its reality. It is a crux; indeed, He Himself is His own cross. The world is God's suffering, and every individual human being who wishes even to approach his own wholeness knows very well that this means bearing his own cross. But the eternal promise for him who bears his own cross is the Paraclete.

The unconscious mind of man sees correctly even when conscious reason is blind and impotent.

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.

The artist's life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him [or her]-on the one hand, the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life, and on the other a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire ... There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire.

I think there will be a reaction - a reaction will set in against this communal dissociation. You know, man doesn't stand forever, his nullification. Once, there will be a reaction, and I see it setting in, you know, when I think of my patients, they all seek their own existence and to assure their existence against that complete atomization into nothingness or into meaninglessness. Man cannot stand a meaningless life.

Rebirth is an affirmation that must be counted among the primordial affirmations of mankind. The concept of rebirth necessarily implies the continuity of personality. Here the human personality is regarded as continuous and accessible to memory, so that, when one is incarnated or born, one is able, potentially, to remember that one has lived through previous existences, and that these existences were one's own, ie, they had the same ego form as the present life. As a rule, reincarnation means rebirth in a human body.

...the soul does not require the organs of sense in order to see, hear, smell, taste and feel, in a much more perfect state; but with this great difference, that in such a state, it stands in much nearer connection with the spirtual than the material world.

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

It isn't possible to kill part of your “self” unless you kill yourself first. If you ruin your conscious personality, the so-called ego-personality, you deprive the self of its real goal, namely to become real itself. The goal of life is the realization of the self. If you kill yourself you abolish that will of the self to become real, but it may arrest your personal development inasmuch it is not explained. You ought to realise that suicide is murder, since after suicide there remains a corpse exactly as with any ordinary murder. Only it is yourself that has been killed.

Everyone can afford to give away a smile.

Dreaming is a philogenetically older mode of thought.

Only in our creative acts do we step forth into the light and see ourselves whole and complete.

It is really the mistake of our age. We think it is enough to discover new things, but we don't realize that knowing more demands a cor­responding development of morality.

To make what fate intends for me my own intention

Life is something that has to be lived and not talked about.

A mandala is the psychological expression of the totality of the self.

In each of us is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves.

The greatest potential for growth and self-realisation exists in the second half of life.

Great talents are the most lovely and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off.

The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semihuman, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, "divine."

Water is the commonest symbol for the unconscious.

If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.

Imagination is a concentrated extract of all the forces of life.

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

We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learnt to bear its ills without being overcome by them.

Never do human beings speculate more, or have more opinions, than about things which they do not understand.

Just imagine what would happen if practicing physicians, the ones who have come into contact directly with suffering humanity, had some acquaintance with Eastern systems of healing. The Spirit of the East surges through every pore as a balm for all afflictions.

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.

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.

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

Enchantment is the oldest form of medicine.

Intuition does not denote something contrary to reason, but something outside of the province of reason.

My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.

Be simple and always take the next step. You needn't see it in advance, but you can look back at it afterwards.There is no 'how' of life, one just does it.

In studying the history of the human mind one is impressed again and again by the fact that its growth keeps pace with a widening range of consciousness, and that each step forward is an extremely painful and laborious achievement. One could almost say that nothing is more hateful to man than to give up the smallest particle of unconsciousness. He has a profound fear of the unknown. Ask anybody who has ever tried to introduce new ideas!

Explore daily the will of God.

The self as the essence of individuality is unitemporal and unique; as an archetypal symbol it is a God-image and therefore universal and eternal.

If a union is to take place between opposites like spirit and matter, conscious and unconscious, bright and dark, and so on, it will happen in a third thing, which represents not a compromise but something new.

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.

It had become clear to me, in a flash of illumination, that for me the only possible goal was psychiatry. Here alone the two currents of my interest could flow together and in a united stream dig their own bed. Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found. Here at last was the place where the collision of nature and spirit became a reality.

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

The angels are a strange genus: they are precisely what they are and cannot be anything else. They are in themselves soulless beings who represent nothing but the thoughts and intuitions of their Lord.