Carl Jung Quotes

423 Sourced Quotes

The attainment of wholeness requires one to stake one's whole being. Nothing less will do; there can be no easier conditions, no substitutes, no compromises.

Carl Jung
Aion is a child at play, gambling; a child's is the kingship. Telesphorus traverses the dark places of the world, like a star flashing from the deep, leading the way to the gates of the sun and the land of dreams.

Carl Jung
The world of gods and spirits is truly 'nothing but' the collective unconscious inside me.

Carl Jung
Language, in its origin and essence, is simply a system of signs or symbols that denote real occurrences or their echo in the human soul.

Carl Jung
From the living fountain of instinct flows everything that is creative; hence the unconscious is not merely conditioned by history, but is the very source of the creative impulse. It is like nature herself - prodigiously conservative, and yet transcending her own historical conditions in her acts of creation.

Carl Jung
I am an orphan, alone; nevertheless I am found everywhere. I am one, but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons.

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
A dream that is not understood remains a mere occurrence; understood it becomes a living experience.

Carl Jung
Insight that dawns slowly seems to me to have more lasting effects than a fitful idealism, which is unlikely to hold out for long.

Carl Jung
Here and there it happened in my practice that a patient grew beyond himself because of unknown potentialities, and this became an experience of prime importance to me. I had learned in the meanwhile that the greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They must be so because they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.

Carl Jung
We carry our past with us, to wit, the primitive and inferior man with his desires and emotions, and it is only with an enormous effort that we can detach ourselves from this burden. If it comes to a neurosis, we invariably have to deal with a considerably intensified shadow. And if such a person wants to be cured it is necessary to find a way in which his conscious personality and his shadow can live together.

Carl Jung
It is a moral achievement on the part of the doctor who ought not to let himself be repelled by sickness and corruption.

Carl Jung
We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.

Carl Jung
It is sometimes difficult to avoid the impression that there is a sort of foreknowledge of the coming series of events.

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
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.

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
Our intellect has created a new world that dominates nature, and has populated it with monstrous machines.

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
One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games and it cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive selves.

Carl Jung
Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naively suppose that people are as we imagine them to be.

Carl Jung
Somewhere, right at the bottom of one's own being, one generally does know where one should go and what one should do. But there are times when the clown we call I behaves in such a distracting fashion that the inner voice cannot make its presence felt.

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
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.

Carl Jung
For it all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

Carl Jung