Carl Gustav Jung - Quotes
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A recent edition of Jung's partially autobiographical work Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

Born	July 26, 1875(1875-07-26) Kesswil, Thurgau, Switzerland
Died	June 6, 1961 (aged 85) Zürich, Switzerland
Residence	Switzerland
Citizenship	Swiss
Fields	Psychiatry, Psychology, Psychotherapy, Analytical psychology
Institutions	Burghölzli
Doctoral adviser	Eugen Bleuler, Sigmund Freud
Known for	Analytical psychology

Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, an influential thinker and the founder of analytical psychology.

Jung's approach to psychology has been influential in the field of depth psychology and in counter cultural
movements across the globe. He emphasized understanding the psyche through exploring the worlds of
dreams, art, mythology, world religion and philosophy. Although he was a theoretical psychologist and
practicing clinician, much of his life's work was spent exploring other areas, including Eastern and Western
philosophy, alchemy, astrology, sociology, as well as literature and the arts.
His most notable ideas include the concept of psychological archetypes,
the collective unconscious and synchronicity.

Jung emphasized the importance of balance and harmony.
He cautioned that modern people rely too heavily on science and logic and would
benefit from integrating spirituality and appreciation of unconscious realms.

The little world of childhood with its familiar surroundings is a model of the greater world.

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.

No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps. A nation has no honour, it has no word to keep.

No one can flatter himself that he is immune to the spirit of his own epoch, or even that he possesses a full understanding of it.

Our blight is ideologies — they are the long-expected Antichrist!

Even if the whole world were to fall to pieces, the unity of the psyche would never be shattered.

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.

The growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and ... each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement.

Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche.

No psychic value can disappear without being replaced by another of equivalent intensity.

A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. I call it the "personal unconscious". But this personal layer rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the "collective unconscious".

Whereas the personal unconscious consists for the most part of "complexes", the content of the collective unconscious is made up essentially of "archetypes".

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.

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.

Every archetype is capable of endless development and differentiation.

The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not.

We Shall Naturally look round in vain the macrophysical world for acausal events, for the simple reason that we cannot imagine events that are connected non-causally and are capable of a non-causal explanation. But that does not mean that such events do not exist.

Primitive superstition lies just below the surface of even the most tough-minded individuals, and it is precisely those who most fight against it who are the first to succumb to its suggestive effects.

Naturally, every age thinks that all ages before it were prejudiced, and today we think this more than ever and are just as wrong as all previous ages that thought so.

Well, I was sitting opposite of her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab-a costly piece of jewellery. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window and immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer, whose colden green color most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words "Here is your scarab."

Called or uncalled, God is present.

A "scream" is always just that - a noise and not music.

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.

A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.
 
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

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.

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

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own.

Great talents are the most lovely and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off.

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.

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

In my case Pilgrim's Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.

It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.

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.

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.

Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.

Man's task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.

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.

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.

Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.

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.

Our heart glows, and secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. Dealing with the unconscious has become a question of life for us.

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

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

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

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.

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.

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.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

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.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

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.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.

The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid.

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.

The word "happiness" would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.

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.

Understanding does not cure evil, but it is a definite help, inasmuch as one can cope with a comprehensible darkness.

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.

We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.

We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learnt to bear its ills without being overcome by them.

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.

When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

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.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.

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.

Dream psychology opens the way to a general comparative psychology from which we may hope to gain the same understanding of the development and structure of the human psyche as comparative anatomy has given us concerning the human body.

The dream shows the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as he would like it to be, but as it is.

As against Freud's view that the dream is essentially a wish-fulfillment, I hold that the dream is a spontaneous self-portrayal, in symbolic form, of the actual situation in the unconscious.

Just as the body bears the traces of its phylogenetic development, so also does the human mind. Hence there ' is nothing surprising about the possibility that the figurative language of dreams is a survival from an archaic mode of thought.

Lack of conscious understanding does not mean that the dream has no effect at all. Even civilized man can occasionally observe that a dream which he cannot remember can slightly alter his mood for better or worse. Dreams can be "understood" to a certain extent in a subliminal way, and that is mostly how they work.

Anyone who overlooks the instincts will be ambuscaded by them.

I knew that in finding the mandala as an expression of the Self I had attained what was for me the ultimate. Perhaps someone else knows more, but not I.

The mandala is an archetypal image whose occurrence is attested thoughout the ages. It signifies the wholesness of the Self. This circular image represents the wholeness of the psychic ground or, to put it in mythic terms, the divinity incarnate in man.

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

I have always been impressed by the fact that there are a surprising number of individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and an equal number who do use their minds, but in an amazingly stupid way.

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart... Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances. If there is any reaction, both are transformed.

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.