Analytic Psychology Quotes by Carl Gustav Jung

A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon. – Analytic Psychology Quotes by Carl Gustav Jung

A dream is a small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens up to that primeval cosmic night that was the soul, long before there was the conscious ego.

A dream that is not understood remains a mere occurrence; understood it becomes a living experience.

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

A special ability means a heavy expenditure of energy in a particular direction, with a consequent drain from some other side of life.

About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times. – Analytic Psychology Quotes by Carl Gustav Jung

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.

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.

As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single individual who will experience it and carry it through. The change must indeed begin with an individual; it might be any one of us. Nobody can afford to look round and to wait for somebody else to do what he is loath to do himself.

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.

Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead, you should give it life…If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature…Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.

Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk. – Analytic Psychology Quotes by Carl Gustav Jung

Creative powers can just as easily turn out to be destructive. It rests solely with the moral personality.

Deep down, below the surface of the average man’s conscience, he hears a voice whispering, “There is something not right,” no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or moral code.

Depression is like a woman in black. If she turns up, don’t shoo her away. Invite her in, offer her a seat, treat her like a guest and listen to what she wants to say.

Don’t hold on to someone who’s leaving, otherwise, you won’t meet the one who’s coming.

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. Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic is alcohol, morphine or idealism. – Analytic Psychology Quotes by Carl Gustav Jung

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic is alcohol, morphine or idealism.

Every human life contains a potential, if that potential is not fulfilled, then that life was wasted.

Every Mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother and every mother extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter.

Everything about other people that don’t satisfy us helps us to better understand ourselves. – Analytic Psychology Quotes by Carl Gustav Jung

Explore daily the will of God.

Faith, hope, love, and insight are the highest achievements of human effort. They are found -given- by experience.

For better to come, good must stand aside.

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.

How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole. – Analytic Psychology Quotes by Carl Gustav 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. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions – not about anything, really. 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 or something I do not know.

I am looking forward enormously to getting back to the sea again, where the overstimulated psyche can recover in the presence of that infinite peace and spaciousness.

I am no longer alone with myself, and I can only artificially recall the scary and beautiful feeling of solitude. This is the shadow side of the fortune of love

I don’t aspire to be a good man. I aspire to be a whole man.

I have always been impressed by the fact that there are a surprising number of individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and an equal number who do use their minds, but in an amazingly stupid way.

I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success or money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears.

I regret many follies which sprang from my obstinacy, but without that trait, I would not have reached my goal. I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud. – Analytic Psychology Quotes by Carl Gustav Jung

If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely.

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.

If we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us.

If you are a gifted person, it doesn’t mean that you gained something. It means you have something to give back.

In all chaos, there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

In each of us, there is another whom we do not know. – Analytic Psychology Quotes by Carl Gustav Jung

Intuition does not denote something contrary to reason, but something outside of the province of reason.

It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how things are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world colour and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I can “experience” is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are […] enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images.

It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remain totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people. – Analytic Psychology Quotes by Carl Gustav Jung

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

Loneliness comes 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.

Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.

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.

My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

Nights through dreams tell the myths forgotten by the day.

No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell. – Analytic Psychology Quotes by Carl Gustav Jung

Nobody can fall so low unless he has great depth. If such a thing can happen to a man, it challenges his best and highest on the other side; that is to say, this depth corresponds to a potential height and the blackest darkness to a hidden light.

Nobody, as long as he moves among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble. Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.

Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.

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

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.

Sensation tells us a thing is. Thinking tells us what it is this thing is. Feeling tells us what this thing is to us.

Shame is a soul-eating emotion.

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

Sometimes you have to do something unforgivable just to be able to go on living.

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.

Somewhere, right at the bottom of one’s own being, one generally does know where one should go and what one should do. But there are times when the clown we call “I” behaves in such a distracting fashion that the inner voice cannot make its presence felt. – Analytic Psychology Quotes by Carl Gustav Jung

That which compels us to create a substitute for ourselves is not the external lack of objects, but our incapacity to lovingly include a thing outside of ourselves.

The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ — all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself — that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness — that I myself am the enemy who must be loved — what then? As a rule, the Christian’s attitude is then reversed; there is no longer any question of love or long-suffering; we say to the brother within us “Raca,” and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide it from the world; we refuse to admit ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves. – Analytic Psychology Quotes by Carl Gustav Jung

The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others

The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual.

The capacity for directed thinking I call intellect; the capacity for passive or undirected thinking I call intellectual intuition.

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.

The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change.

The fact that a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing…He must obey his own law as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths…There are not a few who are called awake by the summons of the voice, whereupon they are at once set apart from the others, feeling confronted with a problem about which the others know nothing. In most cases, it is impossible to explain to the others what has happened, for any understanding is walled off by impenetrable prejudices. “You are no different from anybody else,” they will chorus or, “there’s no such thing,” and even if there is such a thing, it is immediately branded as “morbid”…He is at once set apart and isolated, as he has resolved to obey the law that commands him from within. “His own law!” everybody will cry. But he knows better: it is the law…The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization–absolute and unconditional–of its own particular law…To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being…he has failed to realize his own life’s meaning.

The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.

The gods have become our diseases.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents. – Analytic Psychology Quotes by Carl Gustav Jung

The healthy man does not torture others – generally, it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

The highest, most decisive experience is to be alone with one’s own self. You must be alone to find out what supports you when you find that you can not support yourself. Only this experience can give you an indestructible foundation.

The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith. The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.

The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.

The rational attitude which permits us to declare objective values as valid at all is not the work of the individual subject, but the product of human history.

The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.

The sight of a child…will arouse certain longings in adult, civilized persons — longings which relate to the unfulfilled desires and needs of those parts of the personality which have been blotted out of the total picture in favour of the adapted persona.

The true leader is always led.

There are as 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.

There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion. – Analytic Psychology Quotes by Carl Gustav Jung

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.

Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.

Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie.

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.

To ask the right question is already half the solution to a problem.

To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is.

To me, dreams are part of nature, which harbours no intention to deceive but expresses something as best it can.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.

We may think that we fully control ourselves. However, a friend can easily reveal something about us that we have absolutely no idea about.

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

We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will, at last, bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of grater freedom is cancelled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us. The less we understand of what our [forebears] sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Neitzche called the spirit of gravity. – Analytic Psychology Quotes by Carl Gustav Jung

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it is honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.

What you resist, persists.

Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event.

When we consider the infinite variety of dreams, it is difficult to conceive that there could ever be a method or a technical procedure which would lead to an infallible result. It is, indeed, a good thing that no valid method exists for otherwise the meaning of the dream would be limited in advance and would lose precisely that virtue which makes dreams so valuable for therapeutic purposes – their ability to offer new points of view. Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.

Whether they apply themselves to good things or to bad. And if this is lacking, no teacher can supply it or take its place.

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by the integration of the contraries. – Analytic Psychology Quotes by Carl Gustav Jung

With a truly tragic delusion, these theologians fail to see that it is not a matter of proving the existence of the light, but of blind people who do not know that their eyes could see. It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing.

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.

Words are animals, alive with a will of their own. You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.

Your perception will become clear only when you can look into your soul. Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.