Carl Jung Quotes

424 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
We want to have certainties and no doubts- results and no experiments- without even seeing that certainties can arise only through doubt and results only thorough experiment.

Carl Jung
Whether you call the principle of existence "God," "matter," "energy," or anything else you like, you have created nothing; you have merely changed a symbol. Eastern and Western Thinking, 1938

Carl Jung
Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science.

Carl Jung
I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation of something I do not know. In spite of all uncertainties, I feel a solidity underlying all existence and a continuity in my mode of being.

Carl Jung
Good does not become better by being exaggerated, but worse; And a small evil becomes a big one through being disregarded and repressed.

Carl Jung
Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.

Carl Jung
The mind has grown to its present state of consciousness as an acorn grows into an oak, or as saurians developed into mammals.

Carl Jung
Thanks to the acuteness of his mind, he saw through the poverty of philosophical and Gnostic knowledge, and contemptuously rejected it.

Carl Jung
My mandalas were cryptograms concerning the state of the self which was presented to me anew each day...I guarded them like precious pearls....It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the center. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the center, to individuation.

Carl Jung
The kernel of all jealousy is lack of love.

Carl Jung
The distinction between mind and body is an artificial dichotomy, a discrimination which is unquestionably based far more on the peculiarity of intellectual understanding than on the nature of things.

Carl Jung
All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes.

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
But the meaning of life is not... explained by one's business life, nor is the deep desire of the human heart answered by a bank account.

Carl Jung
Plants were bound for good or ill to their places. They expressed not only beauty but also the thoughts of God's world, with an intent of their own and without deviation. Trees in particular were mysterious and seemed to me direct embodiments of the incomprehensible meaning of life. For that reason, the woods were the places where I felt closest to its deepest meaning and to its awe-inspiring workings.

Carl Jung
The dream arises from a part of the mind unknown to us, but none the less important, and is concerned with the desires for the approaching day.

Carl Jung
The Christian religion seems to have fulfilled its great biological purpose, in so far as we are able to judge. It has led human thought to independence, and has lost its significance, therefore, to a yet undetermined extent.... It seems to me that we might still make use in some way of its form of thought, and especially of its great wisdom of life, which for two thousand years has proven to be particularly efficacious.

Carl Jung
The psychotherapist learns little or nothing from his successes. They mainly confirm him in his mistakes, while his failures, on the other hand, are priceless experiences in that they not only open up the way to a deeper truth, but force him to change his views and methods.

Carl Jung