Carl Jung Quotes

“No dream symbol can be separated from the individual who dreams it, and there is no definite or straightforward interpretation of any dream.”

“Dreams are the facts from which we must proceed.”

“Archetypes, in spite of their conservative nature, are not static but in a continuous dramatic flux. Thus the self as a monad or continuous unit would be dead. But it lives inasmuch as it splits and unites again. There is no energy without opposites!”

“Without playing with fantasy, no creative work has yet come into being.”

“If you think along the lines of Nature then you think properly." from the video "Carl Jung speaks about death”

“The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life.”

“Perhaps, I myself am the enemy who needs to be loved.”

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

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

“One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games.”

“Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living.”

“I want to be freed neither from human beings, nor from myself, nor from nature; for all these appear to me the greatest of miracles.”

“I think it is better for all people to live on, to look forward to the next stage (after death), as if he had to spend centuries, then he lives properly... looking forward to the great adventure ahead, then he lives!”

“It is proverbial, of course, that man never learns from history, and, as a rule, in respect to a problem of the present, it can teach us simply nothing. The new must be made through untrodden regions, without suppositions, and often, unfortunately, without piety also.”

“Whereas I formerly believed it to be my bounden duty to call other persons to order, I now admit that I need calling to order myself.”

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

“We are a psychic process which we do not control, or only partly direct. Consequently, we cannot have any final judgment about ourselves or our lives.”

“If you are unhappy, you are too high up in your mind.”

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

“Man cannot stand a meaningless life.”

“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.”

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

“Protection and security are only valuable if they do not cramp life excessively.”

“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.”

“It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else. Nothing has a more diverse and alienating effect upon society than this moral complacency and lack of responsibility, and nothing promotes understanding and rapprochement more than the mutual withdrawal of projections.”