Carl Jung Quotes

“The Shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance. Indeed, self-knowledge as a psychotherapuetic measure frequently requires much painstaking work extending over a long period of time.”

“Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands.”

“Active imagination requires a state of reverie, half-way between sleep and waking.”

“The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents.”

“Shrinking away from death is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.”

“I believe that history is capable of anything. There exists no folly that men have not tried out.”

“An archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors.”

“The true leader is always led.”

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

“In each of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves. When, therefore, we find ourselves in a difficult situation to which there is no solution, he can sometimes kindle a light that radically alters our attitude - the very attitude that led us into the difficult situation.”

“The collective unconscious consists of the sum of the instincts and their correlates, the archetypes. Just as everybody possesses instincts, so he also possesses a stock of archetypal images.”

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

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

“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.”

“Everything psychic is pregnant with the future.”

“Life is teleology par excellence; it is the intrinsic striving towards a goal, and the living organism is a system of directed aims which seek to fulfill themselves.”

“The symbols of the self arise from the depths of the body.”

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

“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.”

“New ideas are not only the enemies of old ones; they also appear often in an extremely unacceptable form.”

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

“The psychopathology of the masses is rooted in the psychology of the individual”

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

“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.”

“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.”