Carl Gustav Jung best quotes and aphorisms, ideas, thoughts, maxims, and pearls of wisdom from the great Swiss psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, anthropologist, and philosopher.
Like mists arising from a marsh, the dead came near and cried: Speak further unto us concerning the supreme god. Hard to know is the deity of Abraxas. Its power is the greatest, because man perceiveth it not. From the sun he draweth the summum bonum; from the devil the infimum malum: but from Abraxas LIFE, altogether indefinite, the mother of good and evil.
Carl Gustav Jung Septem Sermones ad Mortuos. 1916
A collection of a hundred Great brains makes one big fathead.
Carl Gustav Jung
A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.
Carl Gustav Jung
A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.
Carl Gustav Jung
A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.
Carl Gustav Jung
A ‘scream’ is always just that – a noise and not music.
Carl Gustav Jung
All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.
Carl Gustav Jung
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.
Carl Gustav Jung
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
Carl Gustav Jung
Caution has its place, no doubt, but we cannot refuse our support to a serious venture challenging the whole of the personality. If we oppose it, we are trying to suppress what is best in man – his daring and his aspirations. Should we succeed, we should only have stood in the way of that invaluable experience which might have given a meaning to life. What would have happened if Paul had allowed himself to be talked out of his journey to Damascus?
Carl Gustav Jung
Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.
Carl Gustav Jung
Creative powers can just as easily turn out to be destructive. It rests solely with the moral personality whether they apply themselves to good things or to bad. And if this is lacking, no teacher can supply it or take its place.
Carl Gustav Jung
Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. Why should I henceforth not love my dreams and not make their riddling images into objects of my daily consideration?
Carl Gustav Jung
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.
Carl Gustav Jung
Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.
Carl Gustav Jung
Everyone knows nowadays that people ‘have complexes’. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.
Carl Gustav Jung
A dream that, despite being manifest, does not interpret itself, and never has a clear meaning. No dream says, “You must,” or “This is the truth.” It presents an image, like nature makes a plant grow, and we must draw the consequences.
Carl Gustav Jung
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Carl Gustav Jung
Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own.
Carl Gustav Jung
For a young person, it is almost a sin, or at least a danger, to be too preoccupied with himself; but for the ageing person, it is a duty and a necessity to devote serious attention to himself.
Carl Gustav Jung
From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.
Carl Gustav Jung
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.
Carl Gustav Jung
I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life – that is to say, over 35 – there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.
Carl Gustav Jung
If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.
Carl Gustav Jung
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.
Carl Gustav Jung
If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.
Carl Gustav Jung
In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.
Carl Gustav Jung
It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.
Carl Gustav Jung
It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.
Carl Gustav Jung
It is on the whole probable that we continually dream, but that consciousness makes such a noise that we do not hear it.
Carl Gustav Jung
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
Carl Gustav Jung
Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.
Carl Gustav Jung
Life not lived is a disease from which one can die.
Carl Gustav Jung
Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.
Carl Gustav Jung
Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.
Carl Gustav Jung
Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.
Carl Gustav Jung
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.
Carl Gustav Jung
Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.
Carl Gustav Jung
Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.
Carl Gustav Jung
A dream that, despite being manifest, does not interpret itself, and never has a clear meaning. No dream says, “You must,” or “This is the truth.” It presents an image, like nature makes a plant grow, and we must draw the consequences.
Carl Gustav Jung
Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.
Carl Gustav Jung
Nothing is more repulsive than a furtively prurient spirituality; it is just as unsavory as gross sensuality.
Carl Gustav Jung
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.
Carl Gustav Jung
Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.
Carl Gustav Jung
One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.
Carl Gustav Jung
Our blight is ideologies – they are the long-expected Antichrist!
Carl Gustav Jung
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
Carl Gustav Jung
Psychoanalysis cannot be considered a method of education if by education we mean the topiary art of clipping a tree into a beautiful artificial shape. But those who have a higher conception of education will prize most the method of cultivating a tree so that it fulfils to perfection its own natural conditions of growth.
Carl Gustav Jung
Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.
Carl Gustav Jung
Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
Carl Gustav Jung
Shrinking away from death is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.
Carl Gustav Jung
Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better.
Carl Gustav Jung
The achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of diminution of personality
Carl Gustav Jung
The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor naked heathen, but the spiritual heathen who populate Europe have as yet heard nothing of Christianity.
Carl Gustav Jung
The Christ-symbol is of the greatest importance for psychology in so far as it is perhaps the most highly developed and differentiated symbol of the self, apart from the figure of the Buddha.
Carl Gustav Jung
The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life.
Carl Gustav Jung
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.
Carl Gustav Jung
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
Carl Gustav Jung
The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
Carl Gustav Jung
The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.
Carl Gustav Jung
The difference between a good life and a bad life is how well you walk through the fire.
Carl Gustav Jung
The educated man tries to repress the inferior one in himself, without realizing that by this he forces the latter to become revolutionary.
Carl Gustav Jung
The greatest and most important problems in life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.
Carl Gustav Jung
The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.
Carl Gustav Jung
The heaping together of paintings by Old Masters in museums is a catastrophe; likewise, a collection of a hundred Great Brains makes one big fathead.
Carl Gustav Jung
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.
Carl Gustav Jung
The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.
Carl Gustav Jung
The man who promises everything is sure to fulfil nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition.
Carl Gustav Jung
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
Carl Gustav Jung
The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.
Carl Gustav Jung
The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.
Carl Gustav Jung
The only thing we have to fear on this planet is man.
Carl Gustav Jung
The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
Carl Gustav Jung
The primary cause of unhappiness in the world today is… lack of faith.
Carl Gustav Jung
The psychotherapist learns little or nothing from his successes. They mainly confirm him in his mistakes, while his failures, on the other hand, are priceless experiences in that they not only open up the way to a deeper truth, but force him to change his views and methods.
Carl Gustav Jung
The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.
Carl Gustav Jung
The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid.
Carl Gustav Jung
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 Fuhrer, and sometimes it is luckily the other way round as well, or else mankind would long since have perished of stupidity.
Carl Gustav Jung
The word “belief” is a difficult thing for me. I don’t believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it – I don’t need to believe it.
Carl Gustav Jung
The word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
Carl Gustav Jung
There can be no transforming of darkness into light, and of apathy into movement, without emotion.
Carl Gustav Jung
There is no coming to consciousness without pain.
Carl Gustav Jung
There is no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert. Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum.
Carl Gustav Jung
Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.
Carl Gustav Jung
We are all born originals and die copies.
Carl Gustav Jung
We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything more.
Carl Gustav Jung
We cannot change anything unless we accept it.
Carl Gustav Jung
We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.
Carl Gustav Jung
We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learnt to bear its ills without being overcome by them.
Carl Gustav Jung
We should know what our convictions are, and stand for them. Upon one’s own philosophy, conscious or unconscious, depends one’s ultimate interpretation of facts. Therefore it is wise to be as clear as possible about one’s subjective principles. As the man is, so will be his ultimate truth.
Carl Gustav Jung
We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.
Carl Gustav Jung
We survive by what we receive, but we live by what we give.
Carl Gustav Jung
When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.
Carl Gustav Jung
Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
Carl Gustav Jung
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books, but lives in our very blood?
Carl Gustav Jung
Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.
Carl Gustav Jung
Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
Carl Gustav Jung
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