Carl Gustav Jung Quotes (74 Quotes)

Yoga in Mayfair or Fifth Avenue, or in any other place which is on the telephone, is a spiritual fake.

This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.

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.

Nothing worse could happen to one than to be completely understood.

The unconscious mind of man sees correctly even when conscious reason is blind and impotent

I could not say that I believe. I know I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God.

A person who has not passed through the inferno of their passions has never overcome them.

The wise man who is not heeded is counted a fool, and the fool who proclaims the general folly first and loudest passes for a prophet and Fhrer, and sometimes it is luckily the other way round as well, or else mankind would long since have perished of stupidity.

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.

Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality.

The main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy, and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experience you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character.

I maintained that psychiatry, in the broadest sense, is a dialogue between the sick psyche and the psyche of the doctor, which is presumed to be 'normal.' It is a coming to terms between the sick personality and that of the therapist, both in principle eq

It is indeed time for the clergyman and the psychotherapist to join forces

God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my path violently and recklessly, all things which alter my plans and intentions, and change the course of my life, for better or for worse.

It is on the whole probably that we continually dream, but that consciousness makes such a noise that we do not hear it.

The only thing we have to fear on this planet is man.

The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens into that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was a conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.

The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.

I began to blame the philosophers for rattling away when experience was lacking, and holding their tongues when they ought to have been answering with facts. In this respect they all seemed like watered-down theologians.

I know that in many things I am not like others, but I do not know what I really am like. Man cannot compare himself with any other creature he is not a monkey, not a cow, not a tree. I am a man. But what is it to be that Like every other being, I am a splinter of the infinite deity, but I cannot contrast myself with any animal, any plant or any stone. Only a mythical being has a range greater than man's. How then can man form any definite opinions about himself

What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak to the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind

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.

A collection of a hundred great brains makes one big fathead.

Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands. It is part and parcel of our knowledge and obscures our insight only when it holds that the understanding given by it is the only kind there is.

The Christian West considers man to be wholly dependent upon the grace of God, or at least upon the Church as the exclusive and divinely sanctioned earthly instrument of man's redemption. The East (India), however, insists that man is the sole cause of his higher development, for it believes in self- liberation.

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment, and especially on their children, than the unlived lives of the parents

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.

You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible to influence.

Somewhere there was once a Flower, a Stone, a Crystal, a Queen, a King, a Palace, a Lover and his Beloved, and this was long ago, on an Island somewhere in the ocean 5,000 years ago.... Such is Love, the Mystic Flower of the Soul. This is the Center, the Self.

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.

He who looks outside his own heart DREAMS, he who looks inside his own heart AWAKENS.

My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest. Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light.

Man is never helped in his suffering by what he thinks for himself, but only by revelation of a wisdom greater than his own. It is this which lifts him out of his distress.

You can take away a man's gods, but only to give himothers in return.

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.

Religion is a defense against a religious experience.

Space flights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because it is easier to go to Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one's own being

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.

Enlightenment is not imagining figures of light but making the darkness conscious.

An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead.

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

I realized that one gets nowhere unless one talks to people about the things they know. The nave person does not appreciate what an insult it is to talk to one's fellows about anything that is unknown to them. They pardon such ruthless behavior only in a writer, journalist or poet.

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....

To confront a person with his own shadow is to show him his own light.

The more one sees of human fate and the more one examines its secret springs of action, the more one is impressed by the strength of unconscious motives and by the limitations of free choice.

Because the European does not know his own unconscious, he does not understand the East and projects it into everything he fears and despises in himself.

Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche. This is the World Power that vastly exceeds all other powers on earth. The Age of Enlightenment, which stripped nature and human institutions of gods, overlooked the God of Terror who dwells in the human soul.

My aim was to show that delusions and hallucinations were not just specific symptoms of mental disease but also had a human meaning.

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, w

VOCATUS ATQUE NON VOCATUS DEUS ADERIT Invoked or not invoked, the god is present.