“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
― C.G. Jung
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
― C.G. Jung
“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks
outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
― C.G. Jung
“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
― C.G. Jung
“You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.”
― C.G. Jung
“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other
people.”
― C.G. Jung
“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to
communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views
which others find inadmissible.”
― C.G. Jung
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
― C.G. Jung
“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and
wrong.”
― C.G. Jung
“Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or
idealism.”
― C.G. Jung
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
― C.G. Jung
“As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must
hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want
to know.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”
― C.G. Jung
“Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.”
― C.G. Jung
There's no coming to consciousness without pain.”― C.G. Jung
“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.”
― C.G. Jung
“In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.”
― C.G. Jung
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
― C.G. Jung
“Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event.”
― C.G. Jung
“Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a
thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not. ”
― C.G. Jung
“The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents.”
― C.G. Jung
“Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.”
― C.G. Jung
“We cannot change anything unless we accept it.”
― C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
“Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is
lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.”
― C.G. Jung
“There 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“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.”
― C.G. Jung
“The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits
all cases.”
― C.G. Jung
“The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a
whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my
enemy in the name of Christ -- all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto
the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the
least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself -- that these are within me, and that I myself stand in
need of the alms of my own kindness -- that I myself am the enemy who must be loved --
what then? As a rule, the Christian's attitude is then reversed; there is no longer any
question of love or long-suffering; we say to the brother within us "Raca," and condemn
and rage against ourselves. We hide it from the world; we refuse to admit ever having met
this least among the lowly in ourselves.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection
of our shadow onto others.”
― C.G. Jung
“The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.”
― C.G. Jung
.......................
“An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough.
One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those
who touched our human feeling. 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“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.”
― C.G. Jung
“Every human life contains a potential, if that potential is not fulfilled, then that
life was wasted...”
― C.G. Jung
“Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the
average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune. ”
― C.G. Jung
“Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of
the contraries.”
― C.G. Jung
“About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from
the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general
neurosis of our times.”
― C.G. Jung
“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.”
― C.G. Jung
“It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of
others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in
himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going.”
― C.G. Jung
“I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with
inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage,
reputation, outward success of money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a
spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are
enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears.”
― C.G. Jung
“It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how things are in themselves. The
least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”
― C.G. Jung
“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on
their children than the unlived life of the parent.”
― C.G. Jung
“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.”
― C.G. Jung
“Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To
perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness
and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.”
― C.G. Jung
“There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without
emotion”
― C.G. Jung
“Shame is a soul eating emotion.”
― C.G. Jung
“...anyone who attempts to do both, to adjust to his group and at the same time pursue
his individual goal, becomes neurotic.”
― C.G. Jung
“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 moral code.”
― C.G. Jung
“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.”
― C.G. Jung
“Nobody, as long as he moves among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.”
― C.G. Jung
“Without this playing with fantasy, no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt
we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.”
― C.G. Jung
“Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take
this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideals will serve us as
hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s
morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie.”
― C.G. Jung
“The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going
inward and letting go of it.”
― C.G. Jung
“The true leader is always led.”
― C.G. Jung
“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.”
― C.G. Jung
“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.”
― C.G. Jung
“Nights through dreams tell the myths forgotten by the day.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“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 interests upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our
beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“Words are animals, alive with a will of their own”
― C.G. Jung
“Sensation tell us a thing is.
Thinking tell us what it is this thing is.
Feeling tells us what this thing is to us.”
― C.G. Jung
“When an inner situation is not made conscious it appears outside as fate.”
― C.G. Jung
Books by C.G. Jung
Man and His Symbols Man and His Symbols
Memories, Dreams, Reflections Memories, Dreams, Reflections
The Undiscovered Self The Undiscovered Self
Modern Man in Search of a Soul Modern Man in Search of a Soul
.......................
“What if I should discover that the poorest of the beggars and the most impudent of offenders are all within me; and that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I, myself, am the enemy who must be loved -- what then?”
― C.G. Jung
“I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.”
― C.G. Jung
“What you resist, persists”
― C.G. Jung
“It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world color and sound; and that
supremely real and rational certainty which I can "experience" is, in its most simple
form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain
sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is
mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by
it. We are . . . enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images.”
― C.G. Jung
“A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. As
far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
― C.G. Jung
“With a truly tragic delusion,” Carl Jung noted, “these theologians fail to see that it is not a matter of proving the existence of the light, but of blind people who do not know that their eyes could see. It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing.”
― C.G. Jung
“The sight of a child…will arouse certain longings in adult, civilized persons — longings which relate to the unfulfilled desires and needs of those parts of the personality which have been blotted out of the total picture in favor of the adapted persona.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
“I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my life.
There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions - not about
anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have
been carried along. I exist on the foundation or something I do not know.”
― C.G. Jung
“Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them.”
― C.G. Jung
“We are born at a given moment, in a given place, and like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season in which we are born.”
― C.G. Jung
“My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon
the banality of life.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“There is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are older than the historical man, which are inborn in him from the earliest times, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them.”
― C.G. Jung
“The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith.”
― C.G. Jung
“I am looking forward enormously to getting back to the sea again, where the overstimulated psyche can recover in the presence of that infinite peace and spaciousness.”
― C.G. Jung
“If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool”
― C.G. Jung
“I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole.”
― C.G. Jung
“We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the present day, but in
the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. We
refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse;
that, for example, the hope of grater freedom is canceled out by increased enslavement to
the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of
science expose us. The less we understand of what our [forebears] 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 Neitzche called the spirit of gravity. (p.236)”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.”
― C.G. Jung
“Explore daily the will of God.”
― C.G. Jung
“The girl dreams she is dangerously ill. Suddenly birds come out of her skin and cover
her completely ... Swarms of gnats obscure the sun, the moon, and all the stars except
one. That one start falls upon the dreamer.”
― C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols
“Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.”
― C.G. Jung
“There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how
absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by
imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
― C.G. Jung
“The fact that a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing...He must obey his
own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths...There are
not a few who are called awake by the summons of the voice, whereupon they are at once
set apart from the others, feeling themselves confronted with a problem about which the
others know nothing. In most cases it is impossible to explain to the others what has
happened, for any understanding is walled off by impenetrable prejudices. "You are no
different from anybody else," they will chorus or, "there's no such thing," and even if
there is such a thing, it is immediately branded as "morbid"...He is at once set apart and isolated, as he has resolved to obey the law that commands him from within. "His own
law!" everybody will cry. But he knows better: it is the law...The only meaningful life
is a life that strives for the individual realization--absolute and unconditional--of its
own particular law...To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being...he has
failed to realize his own life's meaning.
The undiscovered vein within us is a living part of the psyche; classical Chinese
philosophy names this interior way "Tao," and likens it to a flow of water that moves
irresistibly towards its goal. To rest in Tao means fulfillment, wholeness, one's destination reached, one's mission done; the beginning, end, and perfect realization of the meaning of existence innate in all things.”
― C.G. Jung
“Faith, hope, love, and insight are the highest achievements of human effort. They are
found-given-by experience.”
― C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
“The gods have become our diseases.”
― C.G. Jung
“It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.”
― C.G. Jung
“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.”
― C.G. Jung
“In such doubtful matters, where you have to work as a pioneer, you must be able to put
some trust in your intuition and follow your feeling even at the risk of going wrong.”
― C.G. Jung
“I am no longer alone with myself, and I can only artificially recall the scary and
beautiful feeling of solitude. This is the shadow side of the fortune of love.”
― C.G. Jung
....................................
“If we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals
its system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us.
--"The Content of the Psychoses”
― C.G. Jung, The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease
“We are not what happened to us,
we are what we wish to become.”
― C.G. Jung
“You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.”
― C.G. Jung
“I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life - that
is to say, over 35 - 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 that which the living religions of every age have given their
followers, and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious
outlook.”
― C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
“Space flights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because it is easier to
go to Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one's own being.”
― C.G. Jung
“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.”
― C.G. Jung
“I deliberately and consciously give preference to a dramatic, mythological way of
thinking and speaking, because this is not only more expressive but also more exact than
an abstract scientific terminology, which is wont to toy with the notion that its
theoretic formulations may one fine day be resolved into algebraic equations.”
― C.G. Jung
“Sometimes you have to do something unforgivable just to be able to go on living.”
― C.G. Jung
“Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering”
― C.G. Jung
“Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality.”
― C.G. Jung
“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
― C.G. Jung
“For two personalities to meet is like mixing two chemical substances: if there is any
combination at all, both are transformed.”
― C.G. Jung, Psychological Reflections: A New Anthology of His Writings 1905-61
“How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am
to be whole”
― C.G. Jung
“Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.”
― C.G. Jung
“The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul,
opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness
extends.”
― C.G. Jung
“That which compels us to create a substitute for ourselves is not the external lack of
objects, but our incapacity to lovingly include a thing outside of ourselves”
― C.G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation
“Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument.
The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who
allows art to realize its purpose through him. As a human being he may have moods and a
will and personal aims, but as an artist he is "man" in a higher sense— he is "collective
man"— one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic forms of mankind.”
― C.G. Jung
“In each of us there is another whom we do not know.”
― C.G. Jung
“Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.”
― C.G. Jung
“The Wrong we have Done, Thought, or Intended Will wreak its Vengeance on
Our SOULS.”
― C.G. Jung
“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”
― C.G. Jung
“There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in theyear'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.”
― C.G. Jung
“But what will he do when he sees only too clearly why his patient is ill; when he sees
that it arises from his having no love, but only sexuality; no faith, because he is
afraid to grope in the dark; no hope, because he is disillusioned by the world and by
life; and no understanding, because he has failed to read the meaning of his own
existence?”
― C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
“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. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending
growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute
nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the
eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“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.”
― C.G. Jung
“A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and
driven by his daimon.”
― C.G. Jung
“The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things
without it.”
― C.G. Jung
“The sure path can only lead to death.”
― C.G. Jung
“Nature has no use for the plea that one 'did not know'.”
― C.G. Jung
“God has fallen out of containment in religion and into human hearts—God is incarnating.
Our whole unconscious is in an uproar from the God Who wants to know and to be known.”
― C.G. Jung
.................................
“What we do not make conscious emerges later as fate.”
― C.G. Jung
“For better to come, good must stand aside.”
― C.G. Jung
“It seems to be very hard for people to live with riddles or to let them live, although
one would think that life is so full of riddles as it is that a few more things we cannot
answer would make no difference. But perhaps it is just this that is so unendurable, that
there are irrational things in our own psyche which upset the conscious mind in its
illusory certainties by confronting it with the riddle of its existence.”
― C.G. Jung
“The years... when I pursued the inner images were the most important time of my life.
Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details
hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from
the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That
was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the
outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the
numinous beginning, which contained everything was then.”
― C.G. Jung
“The time is a critical one, for it marks the beginning of the second half of life, when
a metanoia, a mental transformation, not infrequently occurs.
(on being 36 yrs old)”
― C.G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation
“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.”
― C.G. Jung
“His retreat into himself is not a final renunciation of the world, but a search for quietude, where alone it is possible for him to make his contribution to the life of the community.”
― C.G. Jung
“Every individual needs revolution, inner division, overthrow of the existing order, and
renewal, but not by forcing them upon his neighbors under the hypocritical cloak of
Christian love or the sense of social responsibility or any of the other beautiful
euphemisms for unconscious urges to personal power.”
― C.G. Jung
“In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of individual. This alone makes
history, here alone do the great transformations take place, and the whole future, the
whole history of the world, ultimately springs as a gigantic summation from these hidden
source in individuals.”
― C.G. Jung
“ 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“Intuition does not denote something contrary to reason, but something outside of the
province of reason.”
― C.G. Jung
“Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.”
― C.G. Jung
“Neurosis is the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.”
― C.G. Jung
“Out of evil, much good has come to me. By keeping quiet, repressing nothing, remaining
attentive, and by accepting reality - taking things as they are, and not as I wanted them
to be - by doing all this, unusual knowledge has come to me, and unusual powers as well,
such as I could never have imagined before. I always thought that when we accepted things they overpowered us in some way or other. This turns out not to be true at all, and it is only by accepting them that one can assume and attitude towards them. So now I intend to play the game of life, being receptive to whatever comes to me, good and bad, sun and shadow forever alternating, and, in this way, also accepting my own nature with its positive and negative sides. Thus everything becomes more alive to me.
What a fool I was! How I tried to force everything to go according to way I thought it ought to.
an ex patient of C. G. Jung (Alchemical Studies, pg 47)”
― C.G. Jung
“We have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.”
― C.G. Jung
“Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists... But 'the heart glows,'
and a secret unrest gnaws at the roots of our being.”
― C.G. Jung
“Creative power is mightier than its possessor.”
― C.G. Jung
“In each of us there is another whom we do not know.
Carl Jung
“Astrology is assured of recognition from psychology, without further restrictions,
because astrology represents the summation of all the psychological knowledge of
antiquity.”
― C.G. Jung
“"...the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”
― C.G. Jung
“Image is psyche.”
― C.G. Jung
“We often dream about people from whom we receive a letter by the next post. I have
ascertained on several occasions that at the moment when the dream occurred the letter
was already lying in the post-office of the addressee.”
― C.G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle
“The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.
-- Carl Jung
Swiss psychologist (1875 - 1961)”
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to a better understanding of
ourselves”
― C.G. Jung
“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.”
― C.G. Jung
“We should know what our convictions are, and stand for them. Upon one's own philosophy,
conscious or unconscious, depends one's ultimate interpretation of facts. Therefore it is
wise to be as clear as possible about one's subjective principles. As the man is, so will
be his ultimate truth.”
― C.G. Jung
“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.”
― C.G. Jung
“It is under all circumstances an advantage to be in full possession of one's
personality, otherwise the repressed elements will only crop up as a hindrance elsewhere,
not just at some unimportant point, but at the very spot where we are most sensitive. If
people can be educated to see the shadow-side of their nature clearly, it may be hoped
that they will also learn to understand and love their fellow men better. A little less
hypocrisy and a little more self-knowledge 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“I have gradually learned to be cautious even in disbelief”
― C.G. Jung
......................................6
“How difficult it is to reach anything approaching a moderate and relatively calm point
of view in the midst of one's emotions.”
― C.G. Jung, Essays on Contemporary Events: 1936-46
“Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that
there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and
have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I
held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For
I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. He said I treated thoughts as if I
generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or
people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, “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.” It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. Through
him the distinction was clarified between myself and the object of my thought. He
confronted me in an objective manner, and I understood that there is something in me
which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be
directed against me.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“I am not what happens to me. I choose who I become.”
― C.G. Jung
“The serious problems in life...are never fully solved. If ever they should appear to be
so it is a sure sign that something has been lost. The meaning and purpose of a problem
seem to lie not in its solution but in our working at it incessantly.”
― C.G. Jung
“...it seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making. I wnt about with
all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they
were patients and I was analyzing them. I read a Greek or Negro myth as if a lunatic were
telling me his anamnesis.”
― C.G. Jung, Analytical Psychology, Its Theory and Practice: The Tavistock Lectures
“I have always been impressed by the fact that there are a surprising number of
individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and an equal number who do
use their minds, but in an amazingly stupid way.”
― C.G. Jung
“A true symbol appears only when there is a need to express what thought cannot think or
what is only divined or felt.”
― C.G. Jung
“The psychopathology of the masses is rooted in the psychology of the individual”
― C.G. Jung, Essays on Contemporary Events: 1936-46
“Your vision will become clear only when you look into yor heart. Who looks outside,
dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.”
― C.G. Jung
“... we are so full of apprehensions, fears, that we don't know exactly to what it
points... a great change of our psychoglocal attitude is imminent, that is
certain...because we need more understanding of human nature because ...the only real danger that exists is man himself... and we know nothing of man - his psyche should be studied because we are the origin of all coming evil...”
― C.G. Jung
“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.”
― C.G. Jung
“I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment
of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up
for it.”
― C.G. Jung
“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul.”
― C.G. Jung
“One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is
the invention of good games.”
― C.G. Jung
“Finché non prenderai coscienza l'inconscio governerà la tua vita.
E tu lo chiamerai destino.”
― C.G. Jung
“We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. He is already on the way;
he is like Mohammad. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all
drunk with wild god. That can be the historic future.”
― C.G. Jung, The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings
“Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well
organized in his individuality as the mass itself.”
― C.G. Jung
“All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to
depreciate imagination.”
― C.G. Jung
“Neurosis is the natural by-product of pain avoidance.”
― C.G. Jung
“If you think along the lines of Nature then you think properly."
from the video "Carl Jung speaks about death”
― C.G. Jung
“If the demand for self-knowledge is willed by fate and is refused, this negative
attitude may end in real death. The demand would not have come to this person had he
still been able to strike out on some promising by-path. But he is caught in a blind
alley from which only self-knowledge can extricate him. If he refuses this then no other
way is left open to him. Usually he is not conscious of his situation, either, and the
more unconscious he is the more he is at the mercy of unforeseen dangers: he cannot get
out of the way of a car quickly enough, in climbing a mountain he misses his foothold
somewhere, out skiing he thinks he can negotiate a tricky slope, and in an illness he
suddenly loses the courage to live. The unconscious has a thousand ways of snuffing out a
meaningless existence with surprising swiftness.”
― C.G. Jung
“One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality one
is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is.”
― C.G. Jung
“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.”
― C.G. Jung
“The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.”
― C.G. Jung
“To make what fate intends for me my own intention”
― C.G. Jung
“The real mystery does not behave mysteriously or secretively; it speaks a secret
language, it adumbrates itself by a variety of images which all indicate its true nature.
I am not speaking of a secret personally guarded by someone, with a content known to its
possessor, but of a mystery, a matter or circumstance which is “secret,” i.e., known only
through vague hints but essentially unknown. The real nature of matter was unknown to the
alchemist: he knew it only in hints. In seeking to explore it he projected the
unconscious into the darkness of matter in order to illuminate it. In order to explain
the mystery of matter he projected yet another mystery - his own psychic background -into
what was to be explained: Obscurum per obscurius, ignotum per ignotius! This procedure
was not, of course, intentional; it was an involuntary occurrence.”
― C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy
“When religion stops talking about animals it will be all downhill.”
― C.G. Jung
“A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a
terrible disappointment.”
― C.G. Jung
“After all, there was nothing preposterous and world-shaking in the idea that there might
be events which overstepped the limited categories of space, time, and causality. Animals
were known to sense beforehand storms and earthquakes. There were dreams which foresaw
the death of certain persons, clocks which stopped at the moment of death, glasses which
shattered at the critical moment. All these things had been taken for granted in the
world of my childhood. And now I was apparently the only person who had ever heard of
them. In all earnestness I asked myself what kind of world I had stumbled into. Plainly,
the urban world knew nothing about the country world, the real world of mountains, woods
and rivers, of animals and ‘God’s thoughts’ (plants and crystals). I found this
explanation comforting. At all events, it bolstered my self-esteem.”
― C.G. Jung
“Our mania for rational explanations obviously has its roots in our fear of metaphysics,
for the two were always hostile brothers. Hence, anything unexpected that approaches us
from the dark realm is regarded either as coming from outside and, therefore, as real, or
else as a hallucination and, therefore, not true. The idea that anything could be real or
true which does not come from outside has hardly begun to dawn on contemporary man.”
― C.G. Jung
.............................
“That which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate”
― C.G. Jung
“Not the criticism of individual contemporaries will decide the truth or falsity of these
discoveries, but future generations. There are things that are not yet true today,
perhaps we dare not find them true, but tomorrow they may be. So every man whose fate it
is to go his individual way must proceed with hopefulness and watchfulness, ever
conscious of his loneliness and its dangers.”
― C.G. Jung
“The change of character brought about by the uprush of collective forces is amazing. A gentle and reasonable being can be transformed into a maniac or a savage beast. One is
always inclined to lay the blame on external circumstances, but nothing could explode in
us if it had not been there. As a matter of fact, we are constantly living on the edge of a volcano, and there is, so far as we know, no way of protecting ourselves from a possible outburst that will destroy everybody within reach. It is certainly a good thing to preach reason and common sense, but what if you have a lunatic asylum for an audience or a crowd in a collective frenzy? There is not much difference between them because the madman and the mob are both moved by impersonal, overwhelming forces.”
― C.G. Jung
“The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that
is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.”
― C.G. Jung
“Intuition (is) perception via the unconscious”
― C.G. Jung
“Man is much more the victim of his psychic constitution than its inventor.”
― C.G. Jung
“Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you
noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to
recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept
everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will
suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you
should give it life...If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since
it makes up such a great part of your nature...Be glad that you can recognize it, for you
will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings
to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.”
― C.G. Jung, The Red Book: A Reader's Edition
“We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.”― C.G. Jung
“We can keep from a child all knowledge of earlier myths, but we cannot take from him the need for mythology.”
― C.G. Jung
“The statistical method shows the facts in the light of the ideal average but does not
give us a picture of their empirical reality. While reflecting an indisputable aspect of
reality, it can falsify the actual truth in a most misleading way. This is particularly
true of theories which are based on statistics. The distinctive thing about real facts,
however, is their individuality. Not to put too fine a point on it, once could say that
the real picture consists of nothing but exceptions to the rule, and that, in consequence, absolute reality has predominantly the character of irregularity.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
“Scientific education is based in the main on statistical truths and abstract knowledge
and therefore imparts an unrealistic, rational picture of the world, in which the individual, as a merely marginal phenomenon, plays no role. The individual, however, as an irrational datum, is the true and authentic carrier of reality, the concrete man as opposed to the unreal ideal or “normal” man to whom the scientific statements refer.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
“Apart from the agglomeration of huge masses in which the individual disappears anyway,
one of the chief factors responsible for psychological mass-mindedness is scientific
rationalism, which robs the individual of his foundations and his dignity. As a social
unit he has lost his individuality and become a mere abstract number in the bureau of
statistics. He can only play the role of an interchangeable unit of infinitesimal importance. Looked at rationally and from outside, that is exactly what he is, and from this point of view it seems positively absurd to go on talking about the value or meaning of the individual.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
“Only in the first hour of the night can I become human, while the male dove is busy with the twelve dead.'
--Black Book 2”
― C.G. Jung
“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being”
― C.G. Jung
“Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.” ― C.G. Jung
“I could not say I believe. I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God.”
― C.G. Jung
“Everyone is in love with his own ideas”
― C.G. Jung
“Good advice" is often a doubtful remedy, but generally not dangerous because it has so little effect......”― C.G. Jung
“The infantile dream-state of the mass man is so unrealistic that he never thinks to ask who is paying for this paradise. The balancing of accounts is left to a higher political or social authority, which welcomes the task, for its power is thereby increased; and the more power it has, the weaker and more helpless the individual becomes.”
― C.G. Jung
“For the alchemist the one primarily in need of redemption is not man, but the deity who
is lost and sleeping in matter. Only as a secondary consideration does he hope that some
benefit may accrue to himself from the transformed substance as the panacea, the medicina
catholica, just as it may to the imperfect bodies, the base or "sick" metals, etc. His attention is not directed to his own salvation through God's grace, but to the liberation of God from the darkness of matter.” ― C.G. Jung
“It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course—for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him.”
― C.G. Jung, Aion
“Instead of the concrete individual, you have the names of organizations and, at the
highest point, the abstract idea of the State as the principle of political reality. The
moral responsibility of the individual is then inevitably replaced by the policy of the
State (raison d’etat). Instead of moral and mental differentiation of the individual, you
have public welfare and the raising of the living standard. The goal and meaning of
individual life (which is the only real life) no longer lie in the individual development
but in the policy of the State, which is thrust upon the individual from outside and
consists in the execution of an abstract idea which ultimately tends to attract all life
to itself. The individual is increasingly deprived of the moral decision as to how he
should live his own life, and instead is ruled, fed, clothed, and educated as a social
unit, accommodated in the appropriate housing unit, and amused in accordance with the
standards that give pleasure and satisfaction to the masses. The rulers, in their turn, are just as much social units as the ruled, and are distinguished only by the fact they are specialized mouthpieces of State doctrine. They do not need to be personalities capable of judgment, but thoroughgoing specialists who are unusable outside their line of business. State policy decides what shall be taught and studied.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
“This formulation will not please the mass man or the collective believer. For the former
the policy of the State is the supreme principle of thought and action. Indeed, this was
the purpose for which he was enlightened, and accordingly the mass man grants the
individual a right to exist only in so far as he is a function of the State. The believer, on the other hand, while admitting that the State has a moral and factual claim on him, confesses to the belief that not only man but the State that rules him is subject to the overlordship of “God,” and that, in case of doubt, the supreme decision will be made by God and not by the State.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
“The dictator State has one great advantage over bourgeois reason: along with the individual it swallows up his religious forces. The State takes the place of God; that is why, seen from this angle, the socialist dictatorships are religions and State slavery is a form of worship. But the religious function cannot be dislocated and falsified in this way without giving rise to secret doubts, which are immediately repressed so as to avoid conflict with the prevail trend towards mass-mindedness. […] The policy of the State is exalted to a creed, the leader or party boss becomes a demigod beyond good and evil, and his votaries are honoured as heroes, martyrs, apostles, missionaries. There is only one truth and beside it no other. It is sacrosanct and above criticism. Anyone who thinks differently is a heretic, who, as we know from history, is threatened with all manner of unpleasant things. Only the party boss, who holds the political power in his hands, can interpret the State doctrine authentically, and he does so just as suits him.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
“Bass bands, flags, banners, parades, and monster demonstrations are no different in
principle from ecclesiastical processions, cannonades, and fireworks to scare off demons.
Only, the suggestive parade of State power engenders a collective feeling of security
which, unlike religious demonstrations, give the individual no protection against his
inner demonism. Hence he will cling all the more to the power of the State, i.e., to the
mass, thus delivering himself up to it psychically as well as morally and putting the
finishing touch to his social depotentiation. The State, like the Church, demands
enthusiasm, self-sacrifice, and love, and if religion requires or presupposes the “fear
of God,” then the dictator State takes good care to provide the necessary terror.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
“Words like “Society” and “State” are so concretized that they are almost personified. In
the opinion of the man in the street, the “State,” far more than any king in history, is the inexhaustible giver of all good; the “State” is invoked, made responsible, grumbled at, and so on and so forth. Society is elevated to the rank of a supreme ethical principle; indeed, it is even credited with positively creative capacities.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
“Happiness and contentment, equability of mind and meaningfulness of life – these can be
experienced only by the individual and not by a State, which, on the one hand, is nothing
but a convention agreed to by independent individuals, and on the other, continually threatens to paralyse and suppress the individual.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
“Naturally, society has an indisputable right to protect itself against arrant subjectivisms, but, in so far as society is itself composed of de-individualized human beings, it is completely at the mercy of ruthless individualists. Let it band together into groups and organizations as much as it likes – it is just this banding together and the resultant extinction of the individual personality that makes it succumb so readily to a dictator. A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one.
Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hand of a single madman.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
............................
“Funnily enough, “self-criticism” is an idea much in vogue in Marxist countries, but there it is subordinated to ideological considerations and must serve the State, and not truth and justice in men’s dealing with one another. The mass State has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual. The more unrelated individuals are, the more consolidated the State becomes, and vice versa.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
“What is not brought to consciousness, comes to us as fate.” ― C.G. Jung
“Abraham Lincoln has crossed my path, when I was a little boy in school. He was pointed
out to the schoolchildren as the model of a citizen, who has devoted his life to the welfare of his country—very much in the same way as those great men – bene meriti de patria – of the Roman republic and the Greek polis. Thus, Abraham Lincoln has remained since my early days one of the shining stars in the assembly of immortal heroes. Is there greater fame than to be removed to the timeless sphere of mythical existence?”
― C.G. Jung
“In studying the history of the human mind one is impressed again and again by the fact
that the growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and that each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement. One could almost say that
nothing is more hateful to man than to give up even a particle of his unconsciousness. Ask those who have tried to introduce a new idea!”
― C.G. Jung
“The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.”
― C.G. Jung
“A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.”
― C.G. Jung
“Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.” ― C.G. Jung
“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” ― C.G. Jung
“The man who promises everything is sure to fulfill 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.”
― C.G. Jung
“But, if you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself.”
― C.G. Jung
“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.”
― C.G. Jung
“Man's task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.” ― C.G. Jung
“Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes”
― C.G. Jung
“Only what is really oneself has the power to heal.”
― C.G. Jung
“There is no other way open to us ; weare forced to resort to decisions and solutions where we formerly trusted ourselves to natural happenings. Every problem, therefore, brings the possibility of a widening of consciousness-but also the necessity of saying good-bye to childlike unconsciousness and trust in nature.”
― C.G. Jung
“CG Jung:Thoughts grow in me like a forest, populated by many different animals. But man
is domineering in his thinking, and therefore he kills the pleasure of the forest and
that of the wild animals. Man is violent in his desire, and he himself becomes a darker
forest and a sickened forest animal. Just as I have freedom in the world, I also have
freedom in my thoughts. Freedom is conditional.”
― C.G. Jung
“Civilized life today demands concentrated, directed conscious functioning, and this
entails the risk of a considerable dissociation from the unconscious. The further we are
able to remove ourselves from the unconscious through directed functioning, the more
readily a powerful counterposition can build up in the unconscious, and when this breaks
out it may have disagreeable consequences.”
― C.G. Jung, The Portable Jung
“The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.” ― C.G. Jung
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