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Carl Jung

126 quotes

“The woman is increasingly aware that love alone can give her full stature, just as the man begins to discern that spirit alone can endow his life with its highest meaning. Fundamentally, therefore, both seek a psychic relation to the other, because love needs the spirit, and the spirit love, for their fulfillment.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Seldom, or perhaps never, does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and ... each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All ordinary expression may be explained causally, but creative expression which is the absolute contrary of ordinary expression, will be forever hidden from human knowledge.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For his [the artist's] life is, of necessity, full of conflicts, since two forces fight in him: the ordinary man with his justified claim for happiness, contentment, and guarantees for living on the one hand, and the ruthless creative passion on the other, which under certain conditions crushes all personal desires into the dust.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is rarely a creative man who does not have to pay a high price for the divine spark of his greatest gifts...the human element is frequently bled for the benefit of the creative element and to such an extent that it even brings out the bad qualities, as for instance, ruthless, naive egoism (so-called "auto-eroticism"), vanity, all kinds of vices—and all this in order to bring to the human I at least some life-strength, since otherwise it would perish of sheer inanition.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is imperative that we should not pare down the meaning of a dream to fit some narrow doctrine. ... No language exists that cannot be misused. It is hard to realize how badly we are fooled by the abuse of ideas, it even seems as if the unconscious had a way of strangling the physician in the coils of his own theory.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every interpretation is hypothetical, for it is a mere attempt to read an unfamiliar text. An obscure dream, taken by itself, can rarely be interpreted with any certainty, so that I attach little importance to the interpretation of single dreams. With a series of dreams we can have more confidence in our interpretations, for the later dreams correct the mistakes we have made m handling those that went before. We are also better able, in a dream series, to recognize the important contents and basic themes.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is in applied psychology, if anywhere, that today we should be modest and grant validity to a number of apparently contradictory opinions; for we are still far from having anything like a thorough knowledge of the human psyche, that most challenging field of scientific enquiry. For the present we have merely more or less plausible opinions that defy reconciliation.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For it all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness. The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Each of us carries his own life-form—an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The meaning and design of a problem seem not to lie in its solution, but in our working at it incessantly.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Aging people should know that their lives are not mounting and unfolding but that an inexorable inner process forces the contraction of life. For a young person it is almost a sin — and certainly a danger — to be too much occupied with himself; but for the aging person it is a duty and a necessity to give serious attention to himself.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche. Just as the human body connects us with the mammals and displays numerous relics of earlier evolutionary stages going back to even the reptilian age, so the human psyche is likewise a product of evolution which, when followed up to its origins, show countless archaic traits.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No psychic value can disappear without being replaced by another of equivalent intensity.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Among all my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over thirty-five—there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost what the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our studies of sexual life, originating in Vienna and in England, are matched or surpassed by Hindu teachings on this subject... Psychoanalysis itself and the lines of thought to which it gives rise—surely a distinctly Western development—are only a beginner's attempt compared to what is an immemorial art in the East.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: quoted in Georg Feuerstein, Subhash Kak, and David Frawley. - In search of the cradle of civilization _ new light on ancient India-Quest Books (2011)
“But we must not forget that only a very few people are artists in life; that the art of life is the most distinguished and rarest of all the arts.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) first seen 1933 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Section - The Stages of Life (1933)
“A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. I call it the "personal unconscious". But this personal layer rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the "collective unconscious". I have chosen the term "collective" because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behaviour that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In allem Chaos ist Kosmos und in aller Unordnung geheime Ordnung.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 32 (1981 edition)
“All ages before ours believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment in symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, which is to say, as archetypes of the unconscious. No doubt this discovery is hardly credible as yet.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This world is empty to him alone who does not understand how to direct his libido towards objects, and to render them alive and beautiful for himself, for Beauty does not indeed lie in things, but in the feeling that we give to them.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Wo die Liebe herrscht, da gibt es keinen machtwillen, und wo die macht den vorrang hat, da fehlt die Liebe. Das eine ist der Schatten des andern.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Aion is a child at play, gambling; a child's is the kingship. Telesphorus traverses the dark places of the world, like a star flashing from the deep, leading the way to the gates of the sun and the land of dreams.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not — which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn the literature of the whole world—all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls. Thus the soul has gradually been turned into a Nazareth from which nothing good can come.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Just as man as a social being, cannot in the long run exist without a tie to the community, so the individual will never find the real justification for his existence, and his own spiritual and moral autonomy, anywhere except in an extramundane principle capable of relativizing the overpowering influence of external factors.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is astounding that man, the instigator, inventor and vehicle of all these developments, the originator of all judgements and decisions and the planner of the future, must make himself such a quantité negligeable.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and considered by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You can take away a man's gods, but only to give him others in return.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The seat of faith, however, is not consciousness but spontaneous religious experience, which brings the individual's faith into immediate relation with God. Here we must ask: Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd?”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Reason alone does not suffice.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a "metamorphosis of the gods," i.e. 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. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We Shall Naturally look round in vain the macrophysical world for acausal events, for the simple reason that we cannot imagine events that are connected non-causally and are capable of a non-causal explanation. But that does not mean that such events do not exist... The so-called "scientific view of the world" based on this can hardly be anything more than a psychologically biased partial view which misses out all those by no means unimportant aspects that cannot be grasped statistically.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Primitive superstition lies just below the surface of even the most tough-minded individuals, and it is precisely those who most fight against it who are the first to succumb to its suggestive effects.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Naturally, every age thinks that all ages before it were prejudiced, and today we think this more than ever and are just as wrong as all previous ages that thought so. How often have we not seen the truth condemned! It is sad but unfortunately true that man learns nothing from history.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is sometimes difficult to avoid the impression that there is a sort of foreknowledge of the coming series of events.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I know every numbskull will babble on about "black man," "maneater," "chance," and "retrospective interpretation," in order to banish something terribly inconvenient that might sully the familiar picture of childhood innocence. Ah, these good, efficient, healthy-minded people, they always remind me of those optimistic tadpoles who bask in a puddle in the sun, in the shallowest of waters, crowding together and amiably wriggling their tails, totally unaware that the next morning the puddle will have dried up and left them stranded.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sometimes I had an overwhelming urge to speak, not about that, but only to hint that there were some curious things about me which no one knew of. I wanted to find out whether other people had undergone similar experiences. I never succeeded in discovering so much as a trace of them in others. As a result, I had the feeling that I was either outlawed or elect, accursed or blessed.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My interests drew me in different directions. On the one hand I was powerfully attracted by science, with its truths based on facts; on the other hand I was fascinated by everything to do with comparative religion. [...] In science I missed the factor of meaning; and in religion, that of empiricism.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is only natural that I should constantly have revolved in my mind the question of the relationship of the symbolism of the unconscious to Christianity as well as to other religions. Not only do I leave the door open for the Christian message, but I consider it of central importance for Western man. It needs, however, to be seen in a new light, in accordance with the changes wrought by the contemporary spirit.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. The numinosum is dangerous because it lures men to extremes, so that a modest truth is regarded as the truth and a minor mistake is equated with fatal error.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For lack of empirical data I have neither knowledge nor understanding of such forms of being, which are commonly called spiritual. ...Nevertheless, we have good reason to suppose that behind this veil there exists the uncomprehended absolute object which affects and influences us—and to suppose it even, or particularly, in the case of psychic phenomena about which no verifiable statements can be made.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source