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Acceptance
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We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.
-Carl Gustav Jung, Psychological Reflections
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The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Adventure
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Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Adversity
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We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learnt to bear its ills without being overcome by them.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Age
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From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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In the second half of life the necessity is imposed of recognizing no longer the validity of our former ideals but of their contraries. Of perceiving the error in what was previously our conviction, of sensing the untruth in what was our truth, and of weighing the degree of opposition, and even of hostility, in what we took to be love.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Assumptions
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The psychological context of dream-contents consists in the web of associations in which the dream is naturally embedded. Theoretically we can never know anything in advance about this web, but in practice it is sometimes possible, granted long enough experience. Even so, careful analysis will never rely too much on technical rules; the danger of deception and suggestion is too great. In the analysis of isolated dreams above all, this kind of knowing in advance and making assumptions on the grounds of practical expectation or general probability is positively wrong. It should therefore be an absolute rule to assume that every dream, and every part of a dream, is unknown at the outset, and to attempt an interpretation only after carefully taking up the context. We can then apply the meaning we have thus discovered to the text of the dream itself and see whether this yields a fluent reading, or rather whether a satisfying meaning emerges.
-Carl Gustav Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (1944), pg. 48
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Belief
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The word belief is a difficult thing for me. I don't believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it --I don't need to believe it.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Caution
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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. What would have happened if Paul had allowed himself to be talked out of his journey to Damascus?
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Chaos
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In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Committee
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A collection of a hundred Great brains makes one big fathead.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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The heaping together of paintings by Old Masters in museums is a catastrophe; likewise, a collection of a hundred Great Brains makes one big fathead.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Conflict
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The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Creativity
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Creative powers can just as easily turn out to be destructive. It rests solely with the moral personality whether they apply themselves to good things or to bad. And if this is lacking, no teacher can supply it or take its place.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Decisions
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The great decisions of human life usually have far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness. The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no universal recipe for living. Each of us carries his own life-form within him--an irrational form which no other can outbid.
-Carl Gustav Jung, The Aims of Psychotherapy
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Dreams
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The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens into that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was a conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.
-Carl Gustav Jung, The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man
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It is on the whole probably that we continually dream, but that consciousness makes such a noise that we do not hear it.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Ego
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An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Emotions
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There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Evangelism
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The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor naked heathen, but the spiritual heathen who populate Europe have as yet heard nothing of Christianity.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Evil
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It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Faith
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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 Gustav Jung, Psyche and Symbol, 1958
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Fate & Destiny
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When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Film / Filmmaking / Movies
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The cinema, like the detective story, enables us to experience without danger to ourselves all the excitements, passions, and fantasies which have to be repressed in a humanistic age.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Genius
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Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Happiness
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Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Help
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The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances. If there is any reaction, both are transformed.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Identity
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If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance towards oneself can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Ideology
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Our blight is ideologies -- they are the long-expected Antichrist!
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Imagination
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All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Imitation
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Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Individuality
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Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Insanity
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The source of numerous psychic disturbances and difficulties occasioned by man's progressive alienation from his instinctual foundation, i.e., by his uprootedness and identification with his conscious knowledge of himself, by his concern with consciousness at the expense of the unconscious. The result is that modern man can know himself only in so far as he can become conscious of himself--his consciousness therefor orients itself chiefly by observing and investigating the world around him, and it is to its peculiarities that he must adapt his psychic and technical resources. This task is so exacting, and its fulfillment so advantageous, that he forgets himself in the process, losing sight of his instinctual nature and putting his own conception of himself in place of his real being. In this way he slips imperceptibly into a purely conceptual world where the products of his conscious activity progressively replace reality. Separation from his instinctual nature inevitably plunges civilized man into the conflict between conscious and unconscious, spirit and nature, knowledge and faith, a split that becomes pathological the moment his consciousness is no longer able to neglect or suppress his instinctual side.
-Carl Gustav Jung, The Undiscovered Self, 1957
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Knowledge
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Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Leadership
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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 F?hrer, and sometimes it is luckily the other way round as well, or else mankind would long since have perished of stupidity.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Light
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As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Loneliness
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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 Gustav Jung
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Love
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Where love rules, there is no will to power; where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Masses
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Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Mathematics
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The teacher pretended that algebra was a perfectly natural affair, to be taken for granted, whereas I didn't even know what numbers were. Mathematics classes became sheer terror and torture to me. I was so intimidated by my incomprehension that I did not dare to ask any questions.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Mind, the
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Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Mistakes
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Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Pain
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There is no coming to consciousness without pain.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Parenting
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Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Passion
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A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Personality
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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 Gustav Jung
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Perspective
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It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Pride
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Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Problems
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I had always worked with the temperamental conviction that at bottom there are no insoluble problems, and experience justified me in so far as I have often seen patients simply outgrow a problem that had destroyed others. This 'outgrowing,' as I formerly called it, proved on further investigation to be a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest appeared on the patient's horizon, and through this broadening of his outlook the insoluble problem lost its urgency.
-Carl Gustav Jung, Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower
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Promises
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The man who promises everything is sure to fulfil nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Psychiatry
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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 Gustav Jung
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Reality
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Far from being a material world, this is a psychic world, which allows us to make only indirect and hypothetical inferences about the real nature of matter. The psychic, alone has immediate reality, and this includes all forms of the psychic, even
-Carl Gustav Jung, The Real and the Surreal, 1933
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Recovery (addiction/alcoholism)
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Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Sadness
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Good. There are many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Sanity
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Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Spirituality
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Nothing is more repulsive than a furtively prurient spirituality; it is just as unsavory as gross sensuality.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Our intellect has achieved the most tremendous things, but in the meantime our spiritual dwelling has fallen into disrepair.
-Carl Gustav Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, "Princeton University Press, 2nd ed., R.F.C. Hull trans.", 1968
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Success & Failure
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The achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of diminution of personality
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Talent
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Great talents are the most lovely and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off.
-Carl Gustav Jung, Psychological Reflections
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Teaching
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An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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We think of our efficient teachers with a sense of recognition, but those who touched our humanity we remember with gratitude. Learning is the essential mineral, but warmth is the life-element for the child's soul, no less than for the growing plant.
-Carl Gustav Jung, The Gifted Child - Collected Works, Vol 17
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Thought
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The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Torture
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The healthy man does not torture others -- generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Understanding
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If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Virtue
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I cannot love anyone if I hate myself. That is the reason why we feel so extremely uncomfortable in the presence of people who are noted for their special virtuousness, for they radiate an atmosphere of the torture they inflict on themselves. That is not a virtue but a vice.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Youth
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The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Books by and about Carl Gustav Jung
