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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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Age
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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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Creativity
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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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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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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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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… like everything belonging to the sphere of reality.
-Carl Gustav Jung, Psyche and Symbol, 1958
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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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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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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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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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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… But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected… No one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
-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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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 “unreal” ideas and thoughts which refer to nothing “external.” We may call them “imagination” or “delusion,” but that does not detract in any way from their effectiveness. Indeed there is no “real” thought that cannot, at times, be thrust aside by an “unreal” one, thus proving that the latter is stronger and more effective than the former. Greater than all physical dangers are the tremendous effects of delusional ideas, which are yet denied all reality by our world-blinded consciousness. Our much-vaunted reason and our boundlessly overestimated will are sometimes utterly powerless in the face of “unreal” thoughts. The world powers that rule over all mankind, for good or ill, are unconscious psychic factors, and it is they that bring consciousness into being and hence create the sine qua non for the existence of any world at all. We are steeped in a world that was created by our own psyche.
-Carl Gustav Jung, The Real and the Surreal, 1933
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Spirituality
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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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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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Books by and about Carl Gustav Jung
