Carl Jung Quotes

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.

Words are animals, alive with a will of their own

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.

Real work is completed in silence and strikes a chord in the minds of only a very few.

There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the forms of images filled with content, but at first only as forms without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action.

Our unconscious is the key to our life's pursuits.

People are never helped in their suffering by what they think for themselves, but only by revelation of a wisdom greater than their own. It is this which lifts them out of their distress.

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

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.

It is sad but unfortunately true that man learns nothing from history.

Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.

Life calls not for perfection, but for completeness.

One cannot free oneself by bowing to the yoke, but by breaking it.

Healing proceeds from the depths to the heights.

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.

A purely psychological explanation is ruled out... the discs show signs of intelligent guidance, by quasi-human pilots.

A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.

Therein lies the social significance of art: It is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is more lacking. The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious, which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present. The artist seizes on this image and, in raising it from deepest unconsciousness, he brings it into relation with conscious values, thereby transforming it until it can be accepted by the minds of his contemporaries according to their powers.

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.

The sure path can only lead to death.

It is astounding that man, the instigator, inventor and vehicle of all these developments, the originator of all judgements and decisions and the planner of the future, must make himself such a quantité negligeable.

I have always said to my pupils: "Learn as much as you can about symbolism; then forget it when you are analyzing a dream."

The psychiatrist knows only too well how each of us becomes the helpless but not pitiable victim of his own sentiments. Sentimentality is the superstructure erected upon brutality.

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.

But, if you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself.

As a plant produces its flower, so the psyche creates its symbols.

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

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. . . .

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

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

I am the triple owner of the world, the finest Turkey, the Lorelei, Germania and Helvetia of exclusively sweet butter and Naples, and I must supply the whole world with macaroni.

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.

In all earnestness I asked myself what kind of world I had stumbled into.

Perhaps this sounds very simple, but simple things are always the most difficult. In actual life it requires the greatest discipline to be simple, and the acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook upon life.

But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life's morning — for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.

All fanaticism is repressed doubt.

We need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself.

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

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

Whenever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator state, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units.

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.

Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche.

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

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

I think there will be a reaction - a reaction will set in against this communal dissociation. You know, man doesn't stand forever, his nullification. Once, there will be a reaction, and I see it setting in, you know, when I think of my patients, they all seek their own existence and to assure their existence against that complete atomization into nothingness or into meaninglessness. Man cannot stand a meaningless life.

A 'scream' is always just that - a noise and not music.

The educated man tries to repress the inferior one in himself, without realizing that by this he forces the latter to become revolutionary.

Nothing is possible without love.

My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.

Liverpool is the pool of life, it makes to live.

The squaring of the circle is a stage on the way to the unconscious, a point of transition leading to a goal lying as yet unformulated beyond it. It is one of those paths to the centre.

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.

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.

The right way to wholeness is made up of fateful detours and wrong turnings.

The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual.

But the meaning of life is not . . . explained by one's business life, nor is the deep desire of the human heart answered by a bank account.

The word 'happiness' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced and contrasted and compared to sadness. In comparing how an experience could have been worse we develop gratitude and happiness, while if we compare it how it could have been better we develop bitterness and sadness.

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.

The world hangs on a thin thread, and that is the psyche of man.

The only thing that really matters now is whether man can climb up to a higher moral level, to a higher plane of consciousness, in order to be equal to the superhuman powers which the fallen angels have played into his hands. But he can make no progress until he becomes very much better acquainted with his own nature.