Carl Jung Quotes

424 Sourced Quotes

Caution has its place, no doubt, but we cannot refuse our support to a serious venture which challenges the whole of the personality. If we oppose it, we are trying to suppress what is best in man - his daring and his aspirations. And should we succeed, we should only have stood in the way of that invaluable experience which might have given a meaning to life.

Carl Jung
Our western mind lacking all culture in this respect, has never yet devised a concept, not even a name for "the union of opposites through the middle path", that most fundamental item of inward experience which could respectably be set against the Chinese concept of Tao.

Carl Jung
Our intellect has achieved the most tremendous things, but in the meantime our spiritual dwelling has fallen into disrepair.

Carl Jung
So they speak soothingly about progress and the greatest possible happiness, forgetting that happiness is itself poisoned if the measure of suffering has not been fulfilled.

Carl Jung
A book of mine is always a matter of fate. There is something unpredictable about the process of writing, and I cannot prescribe for myself any predetermined course.

Carl Jung
A sign is always less than the thing it points to, and a symbol is always more than we can understand at first sight. Therefore we stop at the sign but go on to the goal it indicates; but we remain with the symbol because it promises more than it reveals.

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

Carl Jung
The artist's life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him [or her]-on the one hand, the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life, and on the other a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire... There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire.

Carl Jung
The dream is a series of images, which are apparently contradictory and nonsensical, but arise in reality from psychologic material which yields a clear meaning.

Carl Jung
I studiously avoided all so-called "holy men." I did so because I had to make do with my own truth, not accept from others what I could not attain on my own. I would have felt it as a theft had I attempted to learn from the holy men and to accept their truth for myself. Neither in Europe can I make any borrowings from the East, but must shape my life out of myself-out of what my inner being tells me, or what nature brings to me.

Carl Jung
Be simple and always take the next step. You needn't see it in advance, but you can look back at it afterwards.There is no 'how' of life, one just does it.

Carl Jung
The self is our life's goal, for it is the completest expression of that fateful combination we call individuality.

Carl Jung
The answer to human life is not to be found within the limits of human life.

Carl Jung
The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community.

Carl Jung
The individual disposition is already a factor in childhood; it is innate, and not acquired in the course of a life.

Carl Jung
The only thing that really matters now is whether man can climb up to a higher moral level, to a higher plane of consciousness, in order to be equal to the superhuman powers which the fallen angels have played into his hands. But he can make no progress until he becomes very much better acquainted with his own nature.

Carl Jung
I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life.

Carl Jung
Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it.

Carl Jung
Synchronistic phenomena prove the simultaneous occurrence of meaningful equivalences in heterogenous, causally unrelated processes; in other words, they prove that a content perceived by an observer can, at the same time, be represented by an outside event, without any causal connection. From this it follows either that the psyche cannot be localized in time, or that space is relative to the psyche.

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

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

Carl Jung