Jung Carl Quotes & Sayings

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. — Carl Jung

The process of transforming the heart can be difficult because as we open it, we inevitably encounter our own pain and become more aware of the pain of others. In fact, much of our personality is designed to keep us from experiencing this suffering. We close down the sensitivity of our hearts so that we can block our pain and get on with things, but we are never entirely successful in avoiding it. Often, we are aware of our suffering just enough to make ourselves and everyone around us miserable. Carl Jung's famous dictum that "neurosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering" points to this truth. But if we are not willing to experience our own hurt and grief, it can never be healed. Shutting out our real pain also renders us unable to feel joy, compassion, love, or any of the other capacities of the heart. — Don Richard Riso

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. — Carl Jung

An old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as the young man who is unable to embrace it. — Carl Jung

People learn from who we are, rather than what we say, and to believe otherwise is a disease of the mind. — Carl Jung

The idea of suicide, understandable as it is, does not seem commendable to me. We live in order to gain the greatest possible amount of spiritual development and self-awareness. As long as life is possible, even if only in a minimal degree, you should hang onto it, in order to scoop it up for the purpose of conscious development. To interrupt life before its time is to bring to a standstill an experiment which we have not set up. We have found ourselves in the midst of it and must carry it through to the end. — Carl Jung

I would rather be whole than good. — Carl Jung

Every human being is inherently a unique and individual form of life. He or she is made like that. But there is something which a person can do over and above the given material of her nature, and that is she can become conscious of what makes her the person she is, and he can work consciously toward relating what is himself to the world around him. — Carl Jung

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. — Carl Jung

So the lion is the law-breaker. Just as to the primitive man the lion is the lawbreaker, the great nuisance, dangerous to human beings and to animals, that breaks into the Kraal at night and fetches the bull out of the herd: he is the destructive instinct. — Carl Jung

The world of gods and spirits is truly 'nothing but' the collective unconscious inside me. — Carl Jung

The apparently unendurable conflict is proof of the rightness of your life. A life without contradiction is only half a life; or else a life in the Beyond, which is destined only for angels. But God loves human beings more than the angels. — Carl Jung

Where do we live symbolically? Nowhere except where we participate in the ritual of life. — Carl Jung

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

Plato's world of ideas is beautiful. — Carl Jung

We can keep from a child all knowledge of earlier myths, but we cannot take from him the need for mythology. — Carl Jung

Anthropologists have often described what happens to a primitive society when its spiritual values are exposed to the impact of modern civilisation. Its people lose the meaning of their lives, their social organisation disintegrates, and they themselves morally decay. We are now in the same condition. But we have never really understood what we have lost, for our spiritual leaders unfortunately were more interested in protecting their institutions than in understanding the mystery that symbols present. — Carl Jung

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

Only in our creative acts do we step forth into the light and see ourselves whole and complete. — Carl Jung

Becoming conscious is of course a sacrilege against nature; it is as though you had robbed the unconscious of something. — Carl Jung

The symbols of the self arise from the depths of the body. — Carl Jung

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. — Carl Jung

Doesn't the world bring forth thinking in human heads with the same necessity that it brings forth blossoms on the plant? — Carl Jung

Only by discovering alchemy have I clearly understood that the Unconscious is a process and that ego's rapport with the Unconscious and its contents initiate an evolution, more precisely, a real metamorphosis of the psyche. — Carl Jung

We do not feel as if we were producing the dreams, it is rather as if the dreams came to us. They are not subject to our control but obey their own laws. — Carl Jung

The unconscious process moves spiral-wise around a center, gradually getting closer, while the characteristics of the center grow more and more distinct. — Carl Jung

The upheaval of our world and the upheaval of our consciousness are one and the same. — Carl Jung

Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The "newness" in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. — Carl Jung

An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. — Carl Jung

Fidelity to the law of your own being is an act of high courage flung in the face of life. — Carl Jung

Archetypes resemble the beds of rivers: dried up because the water has deserted them, though it may return at any time. An archetype is something like an old watercourse along which the water of life flowed for a time, digging a deep channel for itself. The longer it flowed the deeper the channel, and the more likely it is that sooner or later the water will return. — Carl Jung

Plants were bound for good or ill to their places. They expressed not only beauty but also the thoughts of God's world, with an intent of their own and without deviation. Trees in particular were mysterious and seemed to me direct embodiments of the incomprehensible meaning of life. For that reason, the woods were the places where I felt closest to its deepest meaning and to its awe-inspiring workings. — Carl Jung

I live in my deepest hell and from there I cannot fall any further. — Carl Jung

Neurosis is an inner cleavage-the state of being at war with oneself. — Carl Jung

The left half of your brain deals with logic, language, calculation, and reason. This is the half people perceive as their personal identity. This is the conscious, rational, everyday basis of reality. The right side of your brain, is the center of your intuition, emotion, insight, and pattern recognition skills. Your subconscious. Your left brain is a scientist,. Your right brain is an artist.
People live their lives out of the left half of their brains. It's only when someone is in extreme pain, or upset or sick, that their subconscious can slip into the conscious. When someone's injured or sick or mourning or depressed, the right brain can take over a flash, just an instant, and gives them access to divine inspiration. A flash inspiration. A moment of insight.
According to German philosopher Carl Jung, this lets us connect to a universal body of knowledge. The wisdom all people over all time. — Chuck Palahniuk

Meaning makes a great many things endurable
per haps everything. — Carl Jung

The psychotherapist learns little or nothing from his successes. They mainly confirm him in his mistakes, while his failures, on the other hand, are priceless experiences in that they not only open up the way to a deeper truth, but force him to change his views and methods. — Carl Jung

Whenever there is a reaching down into innermost experience, into the nucleus of personality, most people are overcome by fear and many run away ... The risk of inner experience, the adventure of the spirit, is in any case alien to most human beings. The possibility that such experience might have psychic reality is anathema to them. — Carl Jung

The greatest sin is to be unconscious. — Carl Jung

Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health. — Carl Jung

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

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

Every father is given the opportunity to corrupt his daughter's nature, and the educator, husband, or psychiatrist then has to face the music. For what has been spoiled by the father can only be made good by a father, just as what has been spoiled by the mother can only be repaired by a mother. The disastrous repetition of the family pattern could be described as the psychological original sin, or as the curse of the Atrides running through the generations. — Carl Jung

Whatever is not conscious will be experienced as fate. — Carl Jung

Only the wounded physician heals. — Carl Jung

Obviously astrology has much to offer psychology, but what the latter can offer its elder sister is less evident. So far as I judge, it would seem to me advantageous for astrology to take the existence of psychology into account, above all the psychology of the personality and of the unconscious. — Carl Jung

To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse. — Carl Jung

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

If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely. — Carl Jung

Carl Jung put it this way: "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." With — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

I think that one should view with philosophic admiration the strange paths of the libido and should investigate the purposes of its circuitous ways. — Carl Jung

I saw that everything, all paths I had been following, all steps I had taken, were leading back to a single point - namely, to the mid-point. It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the center. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the center, to individuation. I knew that in finding the mandala as an expression of the self I had attained what was for me the ultimate. — Carl Jung

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. — Carl Jung

There is rarely a creative man who does not have to pay a high price for the divine spark of his great gifts ... the human element is frequently bled for the benefit of the creative element. — Carl Jung

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

Someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, [is] an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. — Carl Jung

It is a moral achievement on the part of the doctor who ought not to let himself be repelled by sickness and corruption. — Carl Jung

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

In the history of the collective as in the history of the individual, everything depends on the development of consciousness. — Carl Jung

Caution has its place, no doubt, but we cannot refuse our support to a serious venture which challenges the whole of the personality. If we oppose it, we are trying to suppress what is best in man - his daring and his aspirations. And should we succeed, we should only have stood in the way of that invaluable experience which might have given a meaning to life. — Carl Jung

Unfortunately, there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and darker it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it — Carl Jung

Even if the whole world were to fall to pieces, the unity of the psyche would never be shattered. — Carl Jung

Carl Jung tells in one of his books of a conversation he had with a Native American chief who pointed out to him that in his perception most white people have tense faces, staring eyes, and a cruel demeanor. He said: They are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something. They are always uneasy and restless. We don't know what they want. We think they are mad. — Eckhart Tolle

Instinct is like Nature herself - prodigiously conservative, and yet transcending her own historical conditions in her acts of creation. — Carl Jung

A [wo]man who is unconscious of [her/]himself acts in a blind, instinctive way and is in addition fooled by all the illusions that arise when he sees everything that he is not conscious of in himself coming to meet him from outside as projections upon his neighbour. — Carl Jung

He who looks without, dreams; he who looks within, awakes. — Carl Jung

Nothing is possible without love. — Carl Jung

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

To become acquainted with oneself is a terrible shock. — Carl Jung

In the end, the only events of my life worth telling are those when the imperishable world erupted into this transitory one All other memories of travels, people and my surroundings have paled beside these interior happenings But my encounters with the 'other' reality, my bouts with the unconscious, are indelibly engraved on my memory. In that realm there has always been wealth in abundance, and everything else has lost importance by comparison. — Carl Jung

As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single individual who will experience it and carry it through. The change must indeed begin with an individual; it might be any one of us. Nobody can afford to look round and to wait for somebody else to do what he is loath to do himself. — Carl Jung

Free will is something that people struggle with so much, but it's very simple to me. Carl Jung said at the same moment you're a protagonist in your own life making choices, you also are the spear carrier, or the extra, in a much larger drama. You've got to live with these two opposite ideas at the same time. — Wayne Dyer

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. — Carl Jung

I had to make a confession of faith in stone. That was the beginning of the tower, the house I built for myself at Bollingen. — Carl Jung

Yahweh [God] must become man precisely because he has done man a wrong. He, the guardian of justice, knows that every wrong must be expiated, and Wisdom knows that moral law is above even him. Because his creature has surpassed him he must regenerate himself — Carl Jung

... the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. — C. G. Jung

The Golden Bough was popular with both scholars and laymen, and it dramatically influenced the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung - Frazer's depiction of tales of myth and romance as echoes of ancient rituals chimed with Jung's description of archetypes that exist within the collective unconscious - as — George Pendle

Mortality is the great rescuer, it finally takes you out of everything, and that makes life good.Read Carl Jung. It makes life richer because this is it; none of us know where we go and this is the fun of it. — Anthony Hopkins

Thanks to the acuteness of his mind, he saw through the poverty of philosophical and Gnostic knowledge, and contemptuously rejected it. — Carl Jung

All fanaticism is repressed doubt. — Carl Jung

What is a normal goal to a young person becomes a neurotic hindrance in old age. - CARL JUNG No wise person ever wanted to be younger. - NATIVE AMERICAN APHORISM — Richard Rohr

The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life. — Carl Jung

Psychological type is nothing static - it changes in the course of life. — Carl Jung

Consciousness can keep only a few images in full clarity at one time, and even this clarity fluctuates. — Carl Jung

It was most essential for me to have a normal life in the real world as a counterpoise to that strange inner world. My family and my profession remained the base to which I could return ... — Carl Jung

Carl Jung never said: "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."
What Dr. Jung said in two separate and unrelated statements was:
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, Contributions to Analytical Psychology, P. 193
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 99. — C. G. Jung

Dawn is born at midnight. — Carl Jung

To capture the drama of the unconscious, one had to start with the key, and the key was the dream. But the novelist's task was to pursue this dream, to unravel its meaning; the goal was to reach the relation of dream to life; the suspense was in finding this which led to a deeper significance of our acts. — Anais Nin

Knowledge does not enrich us; it removes us more and more from the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth. — Carl Jung

The descent into the depths always seems to precede the ascent. — Carl Jung

The creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image and elaborating and shaping the image into the finished work. By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life. — Carl Jung

So far as the personality is still potential, it can be called transcendent, and so far as it is unconscious, it is indistinguishable from all those things that carry its projections ... that is, symbols of the outside world and the cosmic symbols. These form the psychological basis for the conception of man as a macrocosm through the astrological components of his character. — Carl Jung

At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons. There is nothing in the Tower that has not grown into its own form over the decades, nothing with which I am not linked. Here everything has its history, and mine; here is space for the spaceless kingdom of the world's and the psyche's hinterland. — C. G. Jung

A special ability means a heavy expenditure of energy in a particular direction, with a consequent drain from some other side of life. — Carl Jung

I believe that history is capable of anything. There exists no folly that men have not tried out. — Carl Jung

Recognition of the reality of evil necessarily relativizes the good, and the evil likewise, converting both into halves of a paradoxical whole. — Carl Jung

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. — Carl Jung

The word 'happiness' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. — Carl Jung

For me, the good death includes being prepared to die, with my affairs in order, the good and bad messages delivered that need delivering. The good death means dying while I still have my mind sharp and aware; it also means dying without having to endure large amounts of suffering and pain. The good death means accepting death as inevitable, and not fighting it when the time comes. This is my good death, but as legendary psychotherapist Carl Jung said, "It won't help to hear what I think about death." Your relationship to mortality is your own. — Caitlin Doughty