Carl Jung Quotes

424 Sourced Quotes

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.

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

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

Carl Jung
Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

Carl Jung
If a union is to take place between opposites like spirit and matter, conscious and unconscious, bright and dark, and so on, it will happen in a third thing, which represents not a compromise but something new.

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
The fact that astrology nevertheless yields valid results proves that it is not the apparent positions of the stars which work, but rather the times which are measured or determined by arbitrarily named stellar positions. Time thus proves to be a stream of energy filled with qualities and not, as our philosophy would have it, an abstract concept or precondition of knowledge.

Carl Jung
One might expect, perhaps, that a man full of genius could pasture in the greatness of his own thoughts, and renounce the cheap approbation of the crowd which he despises; yet he succumbs to the more powerful impulse of the herd instinct. His searching and his finding, his call, belong to the herd.

Carl Jung
The totality of the psyche can never be grasped by the intellect alone.

Carl Jung
It is the function of the Church to oppose all original experience, because this can only be unorthodox.

Carl Jung
There is no such thing as a pure extrovert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum.

Carl Jung
In the products of the unconscious we discover mandala symbols, that is, circular and quaternity figures which express wholeness, and whenever we wish to express wholeness, we employ just such figures.

Carl Jung
I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once and cannot add up the sum.

Carl Jung
The squaring of the circle is a stage on the way to the unconscious, a point of transition leading to a goal lying as yet unformulated beyond it. It is one of those paths to the centre.

Carl Jung
We must be able to let things happen in the psyche. For us, this becomes a real art... Consciousness is forever interfering, helping, correcting, and negating, never leaving the single growth of the psychic processes in peace.

Carl Jung
Space flights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because it is easier to go to Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one's own being.

Carl Jung
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

Carl 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 Führer, and sometimes it is luckily the other way round as well, or else mankind would long since have perished of stupidity.

Carl Jung
In every adult there lurks a child— an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education. That is the part of the personality which wants to develop and become whole.

Carl Jung
We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a "metamorphosis of the gods," i. e. of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science.

Carl Jung
All my writings may be considered tasks imposed from within, their source was a fateful compulsion. What I wrote were things that assailed me from within myself. I permitted the spirit that moved me to speak out.

Carl Jung
Could by any chance culture be the meaning and purpose of the second half of life?

Carl Jung
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort.

Carl Jung
We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.

Carl Jung
Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.

Carl Jung
Knowledge does not enrich us; it removes us more and more from the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth.

Carl Jung
For lack of empirical data I have neither knowledge nor understanding of such forms of being, which are commonly called spiritual.... Nevertheless, we have good reason to suppose that behind this veil there exists the uncomprehended absolute object which affects and influences us—and to suppose it even, or particularly, in the case of psychic phenomena about which no verifiable statements can be made.

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
But what will he do when he sees only too clearly why his patient is ill; when he sees that it arises from his having no love, but only sexuality; no faith, because he is afraid to grope in the dark; no hope, because he is disillusioned by the world and by life; and no understanding, because he has failed to read the meaning of his own existence?

Carl Jung
In all earnestness I asked myself what kind of world I had stumbled into.

Carl Jung