Carl Jung Quotes

“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.”

“Modern man is battered by the fundamental forces of his own psyche.”

“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.”

“Your vision will be clearer only when you manage to see within your heart.”

“Life calls not for perfection, but for completeness.”

“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.”

“I cannot love anyone if I hate myself. That is the reason why we feel so extremely uncomfortable in the presence of people who are noted for their special virtuousness, for they radiate an atmosphere of the torture they inflict on themselves. That is not a virtue but a vice.”

“If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance towards oneself 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.”

“Intuition does not denote something contrary to reason, but something outside of the province of reason.”

“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.”

“It seems as if it is only through an experience of symbolic reality that man, vainly seeking his own “existence” and making a philosophy out of it, can find his way back to a world in which he is no longer a stranger.”

“Consciousness succumbs all too easily to unconscious influences, and these are often truer and wiser than our conscious thinking.”

“But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yea the very fiend 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 far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”

“In sleep, fantasy takes the form of dreams. But in waking life, too, we continue to dream beneath the threshold of consciousness, especially when under the influence of repressed or other unconscious complexes.”

“Science has destroyed even the refuge of the inner life. What was once a sheltering haven has become a place of terror”

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

“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.”

“Only a fool is interested in other people's guilt, since he cannot alter it. The wise man learns only from his own guilt. He will ask himself: Who am I that all this should happen to me? To find the answer to this fateful question he will look into his own heart.”

“All art intuitively apprehends coming changes in the collective unconsciousness.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“Fortunately, in her kindness and patience, Nature has never put the fatal question as to the meaning of their lives into the mouths of most people. And where no one asks, no one needs to answer.”

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

“Nature does not deceive or conceal, but reveals.”

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

“We are in a far better position to observe instincts in animals or in primitives than in ourselves. This is due to the fact that we have grown accustomed to scrutinizing our own actions and to seeking rational explanations for them.”

“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”

“I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life.”

“Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.”

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

“The word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”

“Intuition is perception via the unconscious that brings forth ideas, images, new possibilities and ways out of blocked situations.”

“The reason for such an “unreasonable” attitude with me is that I am not at all sure what will happen to me after death. I have good reasons to assume that things are not finished with death. Life seems to be an interlude in a long story.”

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

“Projection [of our own shadow] makes the whole world a replica of our own unknown face.”

“Only in our creative acts do we step forth into the light and see ourselves whole and complete.”

“For, in order to turn the individual into a function of the State, his dependence on anything beside the State must be taken from him.”

“Life is a luminous pause between two mysteries that are yet one.”

“From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.”

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

“The dream arises from a part of the mind unknown to us, but none the less important, and is concerned with the desires for the approaching day.”

“A man's hatred is always concentrated upon that which makes him conscious of his bad qualities.”

“If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely.”

“The meaning and design of a problem seem not to lie in its solution, but in our working at it incessantly.”

“The person who looks outward dreams, the person who looks inward awakens.”

“The psyche is a natural phenomenon. All aspects of the psyche, even those which seem pathological or destructive, actually serve the function of furthering our psychological development.”