Carl Jung Quotes

424 Sourced Quotes

The symbol in the dream has more the value of a parable: it does not conceal, it teaches.

Carl Jung
Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfill the way that is in you.

Carl Jung
When you come to think about it, nothing has any meaning, for when there was nobody to think, there was nobody to interpret what happened.

Carl Jung
The teacher pretended that algebra was a perfectly natural affair, to be taken for granted, whereas I didn't even know what numbers were. Mathematics classes became sheer terror and torture to me. I was so intimidated by my incomprehension that I did not dare to ask any questions.

Carl Jung
Whoever is afraid must needs be dependent; a weak thing needs support. That is why the primitive mind, from deep psychological necessity, begot religious instruction and embodied it in a magician or a priest.

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

Carl Jung
Astrology is knocking at the gates of our universities: A Tübingen professor has switched over to astrology and a course on astrology was given at Cardiff University last year. Astrology is not mere superstition but contains some psychological facts (like theosophy) which are of considerable importance. Astrology has actually nothing to do with the stars but is the 5000-year-old psychology of antiquity and the Middle Ages.

Carl Jung
Never do human beings speculate more, or have more opinions, than about things which they do not understand.

Carl Jung
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.

Carl Jung
Thus a word or an image is symbolic when it implies something more than its obvious and immediate meaning. It has a wider "unconscious" aspect that is never precisely defined or fully explained... As the mind explores the symbols it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason.

Carl Jung
As soon as the dialogue between two people touches on something fundamental, essential, numinous, and a certain rapport is felt, it gives rise to a phenomenon which Lévy-Bruhl fittingly called participation mystique. It is an unconscious identity in which two individual psychic spheres interpenetrate to such a degree that it is impossible to say what belongs to whom.

Carl Jung
The most dangerous things in the world are immense accumulations of human beings who are manipulated by only a few heads.

Carl Jung
However far-fetched it may sound, experience shows that many neuroses are caused by the fact that people blind themselves to their own religious promptings because of a childish passion for rational enlightenment.

Carl Jung
Everything good is costly, and the development of personality is one of the most costly of all things. It is a matter of saying yes to oneself, of taking oneself as the most serious of tasks, of being conscious of everything one does, and keeping it constantly before one's eyes in all its dubious aspects.

Carl Jung
Only in the course of the nineteenth century, when spirit began to degenerate into intellect, did a reaction set in against the unbearable dominance of intellectualism, and this led to the unpardonable mistake of confusing intellect with spirit and blaming the latter for the misdeeds of the former.

Carl Jung
But we must not forget that only a very few people are artists in life; that the art of life is the most distinguished and rarest of all the arts.

Carl Jung
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.

Carl Jung
An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough.

Carl Jung
When we must deal with problems, we instinctively resist trying the way that leads through obscurity and darkness. We wish to hear only of unequivocal results, and completely forget that these results can only be brought about when we have ventured into and emerged again from the darkness. But to penetrate the darkness we must summon all the powers of enlightenment that consciousness can offer.

Carl Jung
For the alchemist the one primarily in need of redemption is not man, but the deity who is lost and sleeping in matter.

Carl Jung
If only simplicity were not the most difficult of all things. It consists of watching objectively the development of any fragment of fantasy.

Carl Jung
Recognition of the reality of evil necessarily relativizes the good, and the evil likewise, converting both into halves of a paradoxical whole.

Carl Jung
But India did not pass me by without a trace: it left tracks which lead me from one infinity to another infinity.

Carl Jung
Most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us.

Carl Jung
Our world has become dehumanized. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature.

Carl Jung
There are all too many who, on account of their notorious ineptitude, thrive better in a rationalist system than in freedom. Freedom is one of those difficult things.

Carl Jung
I have no theory about dreams. I do not know how dreams arise. On the other hand, I know that if we meditate on a dream sufficiently long and thoroughly – if we take the boat with us and turn it over and over – something almost always comes out of it.

Carl Jung
Continuous creation is to be thought of not only as a series of successive acts of creation, but also as the eternal presence of the one creative act.

Carl 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 Jung
Whenever you hear anyone talking about a cultural or even about a human problem, you should never forget to inquire who the speaker really is. The more general the problem, the more the person will smuggle his or her own personal psychology into the account he or she gives of it.

Carl Jung