200 Quotes by Carl Jung

Without this playing with fantasy, no creative work has ever come to birth. (Quote Meaning)

The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense. (Meaning)

The least of things with a meaning is worth more. (Quote Meaning)

There's no coming to consciousness without pain. (Meaning)

The man who promises everything is sure to fulfil nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition.

Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.

Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. (Quote Meaning)

Life really does begin at forty. Up until then, you are just doing research.

To be normal is the ultimate aim of the unsuccessful. (Meaning)

Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfill the way that is in you.

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.

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

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.

The difference between a good life and a bad life is how well you walk through the fire

We are not what happened to us, we are what we wish to become.

Who looks inside, awakes. (Meaning)

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. (Quote Meaning)

If our religion is based on salvation, our chief emotions will be fear and trembling. If our religion is based on wonder, our chief emotion will be gratitude.

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness in other people. (Meaning)

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. (Quote Meaning)

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. (Meaning)

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

Be grateful for your difficulties and challenges, for they hold blessings. In fact... Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health personal growth, individuation and self-actualization.

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The brighter the light, the darker the shadow. (Meaning)

The whole point of Jesus's life was not that we should become exactly like him, but that we should become ourselves in the same way he became himself. Jesus was not the great exception but the great example.

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. (Quote Meaning)

We cannot change anything until we accept it. (Meaning)

Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see.

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself. (Quote Meaning)

Real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full.

The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely. (Meaning)

The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.

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. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.

Everyone you meet knows something you don't know but need to know. Learn from them.

A man likes to believe that he is the master of his soul. But as long as he is unable to control his moods and emotions, or to be conscious of the myriad secret ways in which unconscious factors insinuate themselves into his arrangements and decisions, he is certainly not his own master.

The sad truth is that man's real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites - day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end.

We don't really heal anything; we simply let it go. (Meaning)

To ask the right question is already half the solution of a problem.

I cannot define for you what God is. I can only say that my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern has at its disposal the greatest of all his energies for transformation and transfiguration of his natural being. Not only the meaning of his life but his renewal and his institutions depend on his conscious relationship with this pattern of his collective unconscious.

God enters through the wound. (Meaning)

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

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order. (Meaning)

Conflict exists strictly as an opportunity to raise our consciousness.

I've realized that somebody who's tired and needs a rest, and goes on working all the same is a fool.

In every adult there lurks a child— an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education. That is the part of the personality which wants to develop and become whole.

Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often a torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words.

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.

If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely. (Meaning)

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you. (Meaning)

The most important question anyone can ask is: What myth am I living?

Where love rules, there is no will to power. (Quote Meaning)

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

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism. (Quote Meaning)

We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.

Our world has become dehumanized. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature.

An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead.

We don't get wounded alone and we don't heal alone.

When goals go, meaning goes. When meaning goes, purpose goes. When purpose goes, life goes dead on our hands.

The shoe that fits one person pinches another. (Meaning)

I cannot prove to you that God exists, but my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern in the individual has at its disposal the greatest transforming energies of which life is capable. Find this pattern in your own individual self and life is transformed.

You are what you do, not what you say you'll do. (Meaning)

All fanaticism is repressed doubt.

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.

Man cannot stand a meaningless life. (Meaning)

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. (Quote Meaning)

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.

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics. (Meaning)

The greater the contrast, the greater the potential. Great energy only comes from a correspondingly great tension of opposites.

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.

To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is.

Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.

No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.

Normality is a fine ideal for those who have no imagination.

Every human life contains a potential, if that potential is not fulfilled, then that life was wasted.

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul.

Only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the "treasure hard to attain." He alone has a genuine claim to self-confidence, for he has faced the dark ground of his self and thereby has gained himself. This experience gives him faith and trust.

The unconscious psyche believes in life after death

The more veiled becomes the outside world, steadily losing in color, tone and passions, the more urgently the inner world calls us

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

Synchronicity: A meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved.

If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance towards oneself can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures.

Trust that which gives you meaning and accept it as your guide

Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health. (Meaning)

For better to come, good must stand aside. (Meaning)

True art is creation, and creation is beyond all theories. 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.

"Perfection belongs to the Gods; the most we can hope for is excellence."

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.

Intuition is one of the four basic psychological functions along with thinking, feeling,and sensing.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls. (Quote Meaning)

Freedom stretches only as far as the limits of our consciousness.

Shadow work is the path of the heart warrior. (Meaning)

Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries.

Wisdom accepts that all things have two sides (Meaning)

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

There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.

You must go in quest of yourself, and you will find yourself again only in the simple and forgotten things.

Where love stops, power begins, and violence, and terror

Sometimes you have to do something unforgivable just to be able to go on living.

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

Synchronicity reveals the meaningful connections between the subjective and objective world.

Learn your theories as well as you can, but put them aside when you touch the miracle of the living soul

We discover ourselves through others.

It is only our deeds that reveal who we are. (Meaning)

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.

What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and our feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it. The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning.

One must be able to let things happen. (Meaning)

In order to know the light, we must first experience the darkness.

The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.

There is no light without shadow, and no psychic wholeness without imperfection.

You always become the thing you fight the most. (Meaning)

What you resist, persists. (Meaning)

Embrace your grief. For there, your soul will grow.

I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole. (Meaning)

If you are unhappy, you are too high up in your mind. (Meaning)

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.

Nature does not deceive or conceal, but reveals.

"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.

Who looks outside, dreams. (Quote Meaning)

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."

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

The true leader is always led. (Meaning)

The most dangerous things in the world are immense accumulations of human beings who are manipulated by only a few heads.

Enlightenment doesnt occur from sitting around visualizing images of light, but from integrating the darker aspects of the Self into the conscious personality.

All true things must change and only that which changes remains true.

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

Intuition is perception via the unconscious that brings forth ideas, images, new possibilities and ways out of blocked situations.

Neurosis is the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.

Nature seemed to me full of wonders, and I wanted to steep myself in them. Every stone, every plant, every single thing seemed alive and indescribably marvelous. I immersed myself in nature, crawled, as it were, into the very essence of nature and away from the whole human world.

Commendation heals; condemnation destroys.

Nothing is possible without love. For love puts one in a mood to risk everything.

Faith, hope, love, and insight are the highest achievements of human effort. They are found-given-by experience.

The greatest sin is to be unconscious.

When you succeed in awakening the Kundalini, so that it starts to move out of its mere potentiality, you necessarily start a world which is totally different from our world. It is the world of eternity.

The creative mind plays with the object it loves. (Meaning)

The experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego. (Meaning)

A man's hatred is always concentrated upon that which makes him conscious of his bad qualities.

I cannot love anyone if I hate myself. That is the reason why we feel so extremely uncomfortable in the presence of people who are noted for their special virtuousness, for they radiate an atmosphere of the torture they inflict on themselves. That is not a virtue but a vice.

If there is a fear of falling, the only safety consists in deliberately jumping.

To become acquainted with oneself is a terrible shock.

Invited or not, God is present. (Meaning)

I don't aspire to be a good man. I aspire to be a whole man.

It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.

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

Dreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche, outside the control of the will. They are pure nature; they show us the unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature when our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impasse.

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

Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next.

The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.

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.

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

The greater the tension, the greater is the potential.

We all must do what Christ did. We must make our experiment. We must make mistakes. We must live out our own version of life. And there will be error. If you avoid error you do not live.

Life calls not for perfection, but for completeness.

We cannot change anything unless we accept it. (Meaning)

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

Called or not, God is always there.

Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books.

Remember that the only God man comes in contact with is his own God, called Spirit, Soul and Mind, or Consciousness, and these three are one.

Modern man is sick because he is not whole.

Twelve experts gathered in one room equal one big idiot.

If you want to understand the jungle, you can't be content just to sail back and forth near the shore. You've got to get into it, no matter how strange and frightening it might seem.

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

Religion is a defense against the experience of God. (Meaning)

I would rather be whole than good. (Meaning)

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness.

We don't so much solve our problems as we outgrow them. We add capacities and experiences that eventually make us bigger than the problems.

Like the sea itself, the unconscious yields an endless and self-replenishing abundance of creatures, a wealth beyond our fathoming.

Enchantment is the oldest form of medicine. (Meaning)

The attainment of wholeness requires one to stake one's whole being. Nothing less will do; there can be no easier conditions, no substitutes, no compromises.

When we must deal with problems, we instinctively resist trying the way that leads through obscurity and darkness. We wish to hear only of unequivocal results, and completely forget that these results can only be brought about when we have ventured into and emerged again from the darkness. But to penetrate the darkness we must summon all the powers of enlightenment that consciousness can offer.

Shame is a soul eating emotion. (Meaning)

The only thing we have to fear on this planet is man. (Meaning)

Too much of the animal disfigures the civilized human being, too much culture makes a sick animal.

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.

Thunder is no longer the voice of an angry god... No river contains a spirit... no snake the embodiment of wisdom, no mountain cave the home of a great demon. No voices now speak to man from stones, plants and animals, nor does he speak to them thinking they can hear. His contact with nature has gone, and with it has gone the profound emotional energy that this symbolic connection supplied.

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

One finds one's destiny on the path one takes to avoid it.

That which we do not confront in ourselves we will meet as fate.

The descent into the depths always seems to precede the ascent.

You must live life in such a spirit that you make in every moment the best of possibilities.

The healthy man does not torture others. (Meaning)

Only a life lived in a certain spirit is worth living. It is a remarkable fact that a life lived entirely from the ego is dull not only for the person himself but for all concerned.

You are a slave of what you need in your soul.

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.

Nature is not matter only. She is also a spirit

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.

Explore daily the will of God. (Meaning)

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.

Part of the human Self or Soul is not subject to laws of space and time.

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.

It is the individual's task to differentiate himself from all the others and stand on his own feet. All collective identities... interfere with the fulfillment of this task. Such collective identities are crutches for the lame, shields for the timid, beds for the lazy, nurseries for the irresponsible. . . .

Please remember, it is what you are that heals, not what you know.

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.

Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event.

The divine process of change manifests itself to our human understanding . . . as punishment, torment, death, and transfiguration.

Sensation tell us a thing is. Thinking tell us what it is this thing is. Feeling tells us what this thing is to us.

People cannot stand too much Reality.

How can anyone see straight when he does not see himself and the darkness he unconsciously carries with him into all his dealings?

There is a deep need in the world just now for guidance - almost any sort of spiritual guidance.

Whenever you hear anyone talking about a cultural or even about a human problem, you should never forget to inquire who the speaker really is. The more general the problem, the more the person will smuggle his or her own personal psychology into the account he or she gives of it.

Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself. (Meaning)

The mind has grown to its present state of consciousness as an acorn grows into an oak, or as saurians developed into mammals.

Nothing affects the life of a child so much as the unlived life of its parent

Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science.

At present we educate people only up to the point where they can earn a living and marry; then education ceases altogether, as though a complete mental outfit had been acquired... Vast numbers of men and women thus spend their entire lives in complete ignorance of the most important things.

That which you do not bring to consciousness comes to you as your Fate, that which you do bring to consciousness, whether it was what you thought you wanted or not, is your destiny.

Much of the evil in the world is due to the fact that man in general is hopelessly unconscious.

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

The highest, most decisive experience is to be alone with one's own self. You must be alone to find out what supports you, when you find that you can not support yourself. Only this experience can give you an indestructible foundation.

Every psychic advance of man arises from the suffering of the soul.

Anyone who attempts to do both, to adjust to his group and at the same time pursue his individual goal, becomes neurotic.

We know that the wildest and most moving dramas are played not in the theatre but in the hearts of ordinary men and women.

Nobody can fall so low unless he has a great depth. If such a thing can happen to a man, it challenges his best and highest on the other side; that is to say, this depth corresponds to a potential height, and the blackest darkness to a hidden light.

The psychic depths are nature, and nature is creative life.

The unconscious is the unwritten history of mankind from time unrecorded.

Dawn is born at midnight.

I do not believe...I know.

Everyone can afford to give away a smile.

Most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us.

Dreams are the guiding words of the Soul. (Meaning)

The world begins to exist when the individual discovers it.

I have always tried to make room for anything that wanted to come to me from within.

Somewhere, right at the bottom of one’s own being, one generally does know where one should go and what one should do. But there are times when the clown we call “I” behaves in such a distracting fashion that the inner voice cannot make its presence felt.

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

Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it. It may help us to escape all criticism, we may even be able to deceive ourselves in the belief of our obvious righteousness. But deep down, below the surface of the average man's conscience, he hears a voice whispering, 'There is something not right,' no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or by the moral code.

Our whole educational problem suffers from a one-sided approach to the child who is to be educated, and from an equally one-sided lack of emphasis on the uneducatedness of the educator.

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.

Deeply listening to music opens up new avenues of research I'd never even dreamed of. I feel from now on music should be an essential part of every analysis.

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

Mind and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing.

Not only does the psyche exist, but it is existence itself. It is an almost absurd prejudice to suppose that existence can only be physical...We might well say, on the contrary, that physical existence is a mere inference, since we know of matter only in so far as we perceive psychic images mediated by the senses.

The totality of the psyche can never be grasped by the intellect alone.

Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche

The doctor is effective only when he himself is affected. Only the wounded physician heals.

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

When you walk with naked feet, how can you ever forget the Earth?

Free will is the ability to do gladly that which I must do.

Life is a luminous pause between two mysteries that are yet one.

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