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Carl Jung

126 quotes

“The little world of childhood with its familiar surroundings is a model of the greater world. The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon the child, the more it will tend to feel and see its earlier miniature world again in the bigger world of adult life. Naturally this is not a conscious, intellectual process.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1913 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Theory of Psychoanalysis (1913)
“The European invasion of the East was a deed of violence on a great scale, and it has left us the duty — noblesse oblige — of understanding the mind of the East. This is perhaps more necessary than we realize at present.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Suzanne L. Marchand - German Orientalism in the Age of Empire. Religion, Race, and Scholarship-Cambridge University Press (2009)
“Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Transcendent Function" ("Die Transzendente Funktion") (1916)
“Since the Devil is the adversary of Christ he should occupy a position equivalent to his and be the Son of God as well. Satan would be the first Son of God and Christ the second.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Essai d’interprétation psycologique du dogme de la Trinité, in Essai sur la symbolique de l’esprit, Paris, 1991, p. 207. As quoted in Curzio Nitoglia, Satanismo nella Psicologia Analitica di Jung: peggio della Psiacanal…
“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Without, everything seems discordant; only within does it coalesce into unity. Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Fanny Bowditch, 22 October 1916
“This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1928 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: General Aspects of Dream Psychology (1928)
“The conscious side of woman corresponds to the emotional side of man, not to his "mind." Mind makes up the soul, or better, the "animus" of woman, and just as the anima of a man consists of inferior relatedness, full of affect, so the animus of woman consists of inferior judgments, or better, opinions.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1931 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Secret of the Golden Flower (1931) Commentary by C.G.Jung in CW 13: Alchemical Studies. P. 60
“Here and there it happened in my practice that a patient grew beyond himself because of unknown potentialities, and this became an experience of prime importance to me. I had learned in the meanwhile that the greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They must be so because they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Education to personality" has become a pedagogical ideal that turns its back upon the standardized—the collective and normal—human being. It thus fittingly recognizes the historical fact that the great, liberating deeds of world history have come from leading personalities and never from the inert mass that is secondary at all times and needs a demagogue if it is to move at all. The paean of the Italian nation is addressed to the personality of the Duce, and dirges of other nations lament the absence of great leaders.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1932 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Lecture, The Inner Voice, Kulturbund, Vienna (1932); quoted in The Integration of Personality, Farrar & Rinehart, NY (1939)
“The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man (1934)
“For a woman, the typical danger emanating from the unconscious comes from above, from the "spiritual" sphere personified by the animus, whereas for a man it comes from the chthonic realm of the "world and woman," i.e., the anima projected on to the world.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Study in the Process of Individuation" (1934) In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P. 559
“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.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1938 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype (1938)
“I find that all my thoughts circle around God like the planets around the sun, and are as irresistibly attracted by Him. I would feel it to be the grossest sin if I were to oppose any resistance to this force.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sources: David John Tacey (2007). How to read Jung. W.W. Norton & Co, p. 35; Charles Bartruff Hanna (1967). The Face of the Deep: The Religious Ideas of C.G. Jung. “The” Westminster Press, p. 18; Nándor Fodor (1971). Fr…
“No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps. A nation has no honour, it has no word to keep. ... Hitler is himself the nation. That incidentally is why Hitler always has to talk so loud, even in private conversation — because he is speaking with 78 million voices.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: During an interview with H. R. Knickerbocker (1939), quoted in A Life of Jung (2002) by Ronald Hayman, p. 360
“A mother-complex is not got rid of by blindly reducing the mother to human proportions. Besides that we run the risk of dissolving the experience "Mother" into atoms, thus destroying something supremely valuable and throwing away the golden key which a good fairy laid in our cradle. That is why mankind has always instinctively added the pre-existent divine pair to the personal parents—the "god"father and "god"-mother of the newborn child—so that, from sheer unconsciousness or shortsighted rationalism, he should never forget himself so far as to invest his own parents with divinity.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype" (1939) In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious P.172
“The woman who fights against her father still has the possibility of leading an instinctive, feminine existence, because she rejects only what is alien to her. But when she fights against the mother she may, at the risk of injury to her instincts, attain to greater consciousness, because in repudiating the mother she repudiates all that is obscure, instinctive, ambiguous, and unconscious in her own nature.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype" (1939). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P. 186
“The healthy man does not torture others—generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1941 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In Du, May 1941
“No one can flatter himself that he is immune to the spirit of his own epoch, or even that he possesses a full understanding of it. Irrespective of our conscious convictions, each one of us, without exception, being a particle of the general mass, is somewhere attached to, colored by, or even undermined by the spirit which goes through the mass. Freedom stretches only as far as the limits of our consciousness.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1942 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Paracelsus the Physician (1942)
“The more remote and unreal the personal mother is, the more deeply will the son's yearning for her clutch at his soul, awakening that primordial and eternal image of the mother for whose sake everything that embraces, protects, nourishes, and helps assumes maternal form, from the Alma Mater of the university to the personification of cities, countries, sciences and ideals.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1942 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon" (1942) In CW 13: Alchemical Studies P.47
“The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Psychology and Alchemy (1944)
“As the animus is partial to argument, he can best be seen at work in disputes where both parties know they are right. Men can argue in a very womanish way, too, when they are anima-possessed and have thus been transformed into the animus of their own anima.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1951 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.29
“When animus and anima meet, the animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction. The outcome need not always be negative, since the two are equally likely to fall in love (a special instance of love at first sight).”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1951 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.338.30
“We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1953 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Symbolic Life (1953); also in Man and His Symbols (1964)
“We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. (He is already on the way; he is like Mohammed. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with a wild god.)”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Symbolic Life — in The Collected Works: The Symbolic Life. Miscellaneous Writings (1977), p. 281
“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.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1953 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Practice of Psychotherapy, p. 364 (1953)
“Our blight is ideologies — they are the long-expected Antichrist!”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1954 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation (1954)
“We can never legitimately cut loose from our archetypal foundations unless we are prepared to pay the price of a neurosis, any more than we can rid ourselves of our body and its organs without committing suicide.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1954 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: J.B. Priestley, Times Literary Supplement, London (August 6, 1954)
“Every father is given the opportunity to corrupt his daughter's nature, and the educator, husband, or psychiatrist then has to face the music. For what has been spoiled by the father can only be made good by a father, just as what has been spoiled by the mother can only be repaired by a mother. The disastrous repetition of the family pattern could be described as the psychological original sin, or as the curse of the Atrides running through the generations.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1955 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955) CW 14: P. 232
“The wise man who is not heeded is counted a fool, and the fool who proclaims the general folly first and loudest passes for a prophet and Führer, and sometimes it is luckily the other way round as well, or else mankind would long since have perished of stupidity.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1955 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955)
“Eros is a superhuman power which, like nature herself, allows itself to be conquered and exploited as though it were impotent. But triumph over nature is dearly paid for. Nature requires no explanations of principle, but asks only for tolerance and wise measure. "Eros is a mighty daemon," as the wise Diotima said to Socrates. We shall never get the better of him, or only to our own hurt. He is not the whole of our inward nature, though he is at least one of its essential aspects.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1957 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7 (1957). "On the Psychology of the Unconscious" P.32f
“We know as little of a supreme being as of Matter. But there is as little doubt of the existence of a supreme being as of Matter. The world beyond is reality, and experiential fact. We only don't understand it.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Morton Kelsey (1958) as quoted by Morton Kelsey, Myth, History & Faith: The Mysteries of Christian Myth & Imagination (1974) Ch.VIII
“Metaphysical assertions, however, are statements of the psyche, and are therefore psychological. ... Whenever the Westerner hears the word “psychological,” it always sounds to him like “only psychological.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Psyche and Symbol (1958), p. 285
“Our psychology is ... a science of mere phenomena without any metaphysical implications. [It] Treats all metaphysical claims and assertions as mental phenomena, and regards them as statements about the mind and its structure.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Psychology and Religion: West and East (1958), p. 476, as cited in Psychotherapy East and West (1961), p. 14
“...the relatively unconscious man driven by his natural impulses because, imprisoned in his familiar world, he clings to the commonplace, the obvious, the probable, the collectively valid, using for his motto: 'Thinking is difficult. Therefore, let the herd pronounce judgement.'”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky. (1959), C.G. Jung, R.F.C. Hull (translator) (Princeton Press, 1979,
“[T]here are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word "happy" would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Art of Living", interview with journalist Gordon Young first published in 1960
“Even if the whole world were to fall to pieces, the unity of the psyche would never be shattered. And the wider and more numerous the fissures on the surface, the more the unity is strengthened in the depths.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Civilization in Transition (1964)
“If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Mysterium Coniunctionis, from The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (1966)
“The whole nature of man presupposes woman, both physically and spiritually. His system is tuned into woman from the start, just as it is prepared for a quite definite world where there is water, light, air, salt, carbohydrates etc..”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Two Essays in Analytical Psychology" In CW 7: P. 188 (1967)
“One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games and it cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive selves.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Jung and the Story of Our Time, Laurens van der Post (1977)
“Nature must not win the game, but she cannot lose. And whenever the conscious mind clings to hard and fast concepts and gets caught in its own rules and regulations—as is unavoidable and of the essence of civilized consciousness—nature pops up with her inescapable demands.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The idea of an all-powerful divine Being is present everywhere, unconsciously if not consciously, because it is an archetype. There is in the psyche some superior power, and if it is not consciously a god, it is the "belly" at least, in St. Paul's words. I therefore consider it wiser to acknowledge the idea of God consciously, for, if we do not, something else is made God, usually something quite inappropiate and stupid such as only an "enlightened" intellect could hatch forth.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: C. G. Jung. 2014. Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 7: Two Essays in Analytical Psychology. Princeton University Press. p. 71
“When one is not understood one should as a rule lower one's voice, because when one really speaks loudly enough and is not heard, it is because people do not want to hear. One had better begin to mutter to oneself, then they get curious.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Nietzsche's Zarathustra (1988), p. 30
“When we assume God to be a guiding principle—well, sure enough, a god is usually characteristic of a certain system of thought or morality. For instance, take the Christian God, the summum bonum: God is love, love being the highest moral principle; and God is spirit, the spirit being the supreme idea of meaning. All our Christian moral concepts derive from such assumptions, and the supreme essence of all of them is what we call God.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Nietzsche's Zarathustra (1988), p. 40
“Great and enduring civilizations like those of the Hindus and the Chinese were built upon this foundation and developed from it a discipline of self-knowledge which they brought to a high pitch of refinement both in philosophy and practice.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul. quoted in Hindu Culture, K. Guru Dutt, and quoted in Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.
“The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. It is therefore short-sighted to treat fantasy, on account of its risky or unacceptable nature, as a thing of little worth.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The great problems of life — sexuality, of course, among others — are always related to the primordial images of the collective unconscious. These images are really balancing or compensating factors which correspond with the problems life presents in actuality. This is not to be marvelled at, since these images are deposits representing the accumulated experience of thousands of years of struggle for adaptation and existence.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What can a man say about woman, his own opposite? I mean of course something sensible, that is outside the sexual program, free of resentment, illusion, and theory. Where is the man to be found capable of such superiority? Woman always stands just where the man's shadow falls, so that he is only too liable to confuse the two. Then, when he tries to repair this misunderstanding, he overvalues her and believes her the most desirable thing in the world.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Unconscious assumptions or opinions are the worst enemy of woman; they can even grow into a positively demonic passion that exasperates and disgusts men, and does the woman herself the greatest injury by gradually smothering the charm and meaning of her femininity and driving it into the background. Such a development naturally ends in profound psychological disunion, in short, in a neurosis.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The discussion of the sexual problem is only a somewhat crude prelude to a far deeper question, and that is the question of the psychological relationship between the sexes. In comparison with this the other pales into insignificance, and with it we enter the real domain of woman. Woman's psychology is founded on the principle of Eros, the great binder and loosener, whereas from ancient times the ruling principle ascribed to man is Logos.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source