Quotes by Carl Jung

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.