Carl Jung Quotes

424 Sourced Quotes

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 Jung
I am the triple owner of the world, the finest Turkey, the Lorelei, Germania and Helvetia of exclusively sweet butter and Naples, and I must supply the whole world with macaroni.

Carl Jung
At bottom we discover nothing new and unknown in the mentally ill; rather, we encounter the substratum of our own natures.

Carl Jung
I readily admit that I have such a great respect for what happens in the human soul that I would be afraid of disturbing and distorting the silent operation of nature by clumsy interference.

Carl Jung
Man positively needs general ideas and convictions that will give a meaning to his life and enable him to find a place for himself in the universe.

Carl Jung
Our civilization bothers us less with food tabus than with sexual restrictions. In modern society these have come to play the role of an injured deity that is getting its own back in every sphere of human activity, including psychology, where it would reduce "spirit" to sexual repression.

Carl Jung
Not nature, but the "genius of mankind," has knotted the hangman's noose with which it can execute itself at any moment.

Carl Jung
Error is just as important a condition of life's progress as truth

Carl Jung
The unconscious is the unwritten history of mankind from time unrecorded.

Carl Jung
Anyone who takes the sure road is as good as dead.

Carl Jung
The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole.

Carl Jung
It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world color and sound... Everything is mediated through the mind.

Carl Jung
The underlying, primary psychic reality is so inconceivably complex that it can be grasped only at the farthest reach of intuition, and then but very dimly. That is why it needs symbols.

Carl Jung
An archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors.

Carl Jung
St. Thomas is really a great man quite apart from his saintliness.

Carl Jung
The unconscious wants to flow into consciousness in order to reach the light, but at the same time it continually thwarts itself, because it would rather remain unconscious. That is to say, God wants to become man, but not quite.

Carl Jung
I find that all my thoughts circle around God like the planets around the sun, and are as irresistibly attracted by Him. I would feel it to be the grossest sin if I were to oppose any resistance to this force.

Carl Jung
Nature seemed to me full of wonders, and I wanted to steep myself in them. Every stone, every plant, every single thing seemed alive and indescribably marvelous. I immersed myself in nature, crawled, as it were, into the very essence of nature and away from the whole human world.

Carl Jung
In each of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves. When, therefore, we find ourselves in a difficult situation to which there is no solution, he can sometimes kindle a light that radically alters our attitude - the very attitude that led us into the difficult situation.

Carl Jung
There is no light without shadow, and no psychic wholeness without imperfection.

Carl Jung
So far as the personality is still potential, it can be called transcendent, and so far as it is unconscious, it is indistinguishable from all those things that carry its projections...that is, symbols of the outside world and the cosmic symbols. These form the psychological basis for the conception of man as a macrocosm through the astrological components of his character.

Carl Jung
The doctor is effective only when he himself is affected. Only the wounded physician heals.

Carl Jung
Eternal truth needs a human language that alters with the spirit of the times.

Carl Jung
Neurosis is an inner cleavage-the state of being at war with oneself.

Carl Jung
Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands.

Carl Jung
Consciousness can keep only a few images in full clarity at one time, and even this clarity fluctuates.

Carl Jung
Unfortunately, there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and darker it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it

Carl Jung
If I accept the fact that a god is absolute and beyond all human experiences, he leaves me cold. I do not affect him, nor does he affect me. But if I know that a god is a powerful impulse in my soul, at once I must concern myself with him, for then he can become important

Carl Jung
You must go in quest of yourself, and you will find yourself again only in the simple and forgotten things.

Carl Jung
A sense of a wider meaning to one's existence is what raises a man beyond mere getting and spending. If he lacks this sense, he is lost and miserable.

Carl Jung