Carl G Jung Quotes

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.

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.

The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers. Carl Jung Swiss psychologist (1875 - 1961)

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.

Nobody can fall so low unless he has a 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.

Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness.

We should know what our convictions are, and stand for them. Upon one's own philosophy, conscious or unconscious, depends one's ultimate interpretation of facts. Therefore it is wise to be as clear as possible about one's subjective principles. As the man is, so will be his ultimate truth.

I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it.

If you think along the lines of Nature then you think properly." from the video "Carl Jung speaks about death

But the shadow is merely somewhat inferior, primitive, unadapted, and awkward; not wholly bad. It even contains childish or primitive qualities which would in a way vitalize and embellish human existence, but convention forbids!

...the mind that is collectively orientated is quite incapable of thinking and feeling in any other way than by projection.

I have done without electricity, and tend the fireplace and stove myself. Evenings, I light the old lamps. There is no running water, and I pump the water from the well. I chop the wood and cook the food. These simple acts make man simple; and how difficult it is to be simple!

At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons. There is nothing in the Tower that has not grown into its own form over the decades, nothing with which I am not linked. Here everything has its history, and mine; here is space for the spaceless kingdom of the world's and the psyche's hinterland.

Carl Jung never said: “There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” What Dr. Jung said in two separate and unrelated statements was: Seldom, or perhaps never, does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain. ~Carl Jung, Contributions to Analytical Psychology, P. 193 People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 99.

... (because) the only real danger that exists is men himself. He is the great danger and we are pityfully unaware of it. We know nothing of men. Far too little ... Carl Gustav Jung, 1959 in an interview with John Freeman ( youtube watch?v=2AMu-G51yTY 38:04)

Remember that you can know yourself, and with that you know enough. But you cannot know others and everything else. Beware of knowing what lies beyond yourself, or else your presumed knowledge will suffocate the life of those who know themselves. A knower may know himself. That is his limit." — Carl Gustav Jung

But what a dreary world it would be if the rules were not violated sometimes!

I myself found a fascinating example of this in Nietzsche’s book Thus Spake Zarathustra, where the author reproduces almost word for word an incident reported in a ship’s log for the year 1686. By sheer chance I had read this seaman’s yarn in a book published about 1835 (half a century before Nietzsche wrote); and when I found the similar passage in Thus Spake Zarathustra, I was struck by its peculiar style, which was different from Nietzsche’s usual language. I was convinced that Nietzsche must also have seen the old book, though he made no reference to it. I wrote to his sister, who was still alive, and she confirmed that she and her brother had in fact read the book together when he was 11 years old. I think, from the context, it is inconceivable that Nietzsche had any idea that he was plagiarizing this story. I believe that fifty years later it has unexpectedly slipped into focus in his conscious mind.

In spite of our proud domination of nature, we are still her victims, for we have not even learned to control our nature.

The healthy man does not torture others—generally, it is the tortured who turn into torturers. — Carl Gustav Jung, Swiss psychologist (1875 - 1961)

That you find Kierkegaard "frightful" has warmed the cockles of my heart. I find him simply insupportable and cannot understand, or rather, I understand only too well, why the theological neurosis of our time has made such a fuss over him. You are quite right when you say that the pathological is never valuable. It does, however, cause us the greatest difficulties and for this reason we learn the most from it.

This shift from automatic living to awakening parallels Carl Jung's Individuation, Dada Bhagwan's Self-realization, Dr. Abraham Mazlow's Self-Actualization, G.I. Gurdjieff's Self-Work and other related approaches to differentiating the innate being from the unconscious complexes we have mistaken for identity.

Ideas are not just counters used by the calculating mind; they are also golden vessels full of living feeling. "Freedom" is not a mere abstraction, it is also an emotion. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Pages 310-311.

The erotic instinct is something questionable, and will always be so whatever a future set of laws may have to say on the matter. It belongs, on the one hand, to the original animal nature of man, which will exist as long as man has an animal body. On the other hand, it is connected with the highest forms of the spirit. But it blooms only when the spirit and instinct are in true harmony. If one or the other aspect is missing, then an injury occurs, or at least there is a one-sided lack of balance which easily slips into the pathological. Too much of the animal disfigures the civilized human being, too much culture makes a sick animal.

Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face.

That Kierkegaard was a stimulating and pioneering force precisely because of his neurosis is not surprising since he started out with a conception of God that had a peculiar Protestant bias which he shares with a great many Protestants. To such people his problems and his grizzling are entirely acceptable because to them it serves the same purpose as it served him, you can settle everything in the study and need not do it in life. Out there things are apt to get unpleasant. Neurosis does not produce art. It is uncreative and inimical to life. It is failure and bungling. But the moderns mistake morbidity for creative birth—part of the general lunacy of our time. It is, of course, an unanswerable question what an artist would have created if he had not been neurotic.

As Nietzsche remarked, where pride is insistent enough, memory prefers to give way. Thus, among the lost memories, we encounter not a few that owe their subliminal state (and there incapacity to be voluntary reproduced) to their disagreeable and incompatible nature. The psychologist calls these repressed contents.

Reason becomes unreason when separated from the heart, and a psychic life void of universal ideas sickens from undernourishment. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Page 311.

Of course when one opens a coffin, one destroys it. Nevertheless a delicate odour of cedarwood will come forth.

My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you—are you there? I have returned, I am here again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you, I am with you. After long years of long wandering, I have come to you again. Should I tell you everything I have seen, experienced, and drunk in? Or do you not want to hear about all the noise of life and the world? But one thing you must know: the one thing I have learned is that one must live this life. This life is the way, the long sought-after way to the unfathomable, which we call divine. There is no other way, all other ways are false paths.

We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learnt to bear its ills without being overcome by them.

whereby the planetary spirits who are needed in order to unite the spirit or soul with the body, and to transform the latter, are compelled to descend

truth is the supreme virtue and an impregnable stronghold” * (p. 458).

labyrinths. The protection is so complete as to turn back all that is devilish and undesirable.

Do not cling to the shore, but set sail for exotic lands and places no longer found on maps. Walk on hallowed grounds. Blaze new trails. The term synchronicity was coined in the 1950s by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, to describe uncanny coincidences that seem to be meaningful. The Greek roots are syn-, "together," and khronos, "time." Synchronicity is the effector of Gnosis. Explore the Bogomils and the Cathars not just through books but, if at all possible, by visiting their lands, cemeteries and descendants. Finally, explore the most contemporary manifestations of Gnosticism: the writings of C.G. Jung, Jorge Luis Borges, Aleister Crowley, René Guénon, Hermann Hesse, Philip K. Dick, and Albert Camus. Gradually, you will begin to understand the various thought currents and systems existing in Gnosticism, and you will have begun to understand what does and does not appeal to you in Gnostic thought.

As the water of ablution, the dew falls from heaven, purifies the body, and makes it ready to receive the soul;195 in other words, it brings about the albedo, the white state of innocence,

I am the true medicine [says Wisdom], correcting and transmuting that which is no longer into that which it was before its corruption, and that which is not into that which it ought to be.” * (Ibid., p. 459).

The girl dreams she is dangerously ill. Suddenly birds come out of her skin and cover her completely... Swarms of gnats obscure the sun, the moon, and all the stars except one. That one start falls upon the dreamer.

Là où il y a de la lumière, il y a nécessairement de l'ombre, là où il y a de l'ombre, il y a nécessairement de la lumière. Sans lumière il n'y a pas d'ombre, et, sans ombre, pas de lumière. Carl G. Jung a expliqué ces choses-là dans un de ses livres.

...Bu yüzden bir insana ne yaptığını değil, nasıl yaptığını sorun. Bunu sevgiden ya da aşk duygusuyla yapıyorsa bir tanrıya hizmet ediyordur ve her ne yaparsa yapsın onu yargılayacak olan biz değiliz çünkü o aşk ulvileşmiştir..." Carl G. Jung-Feminen, Syf 98

..."Един велик дух никога не е напълно ясен." Това е вярно, и точно така е с едно велико чувство - то никога не е съвсем ясно. Човек се наслаждава на едно истинско чувство, когато то е мъничко съмнително, а пък мисъл, в която няма поне малко противоречие, не е убедителна.

Man is bound to follow the exploits of his scientific and inventive mind and to admire himself for his splendid achievements. At the same time, he cannot help admitting that his genius shows an uncanny tendency to invent things that become more and more dangerous, because they represent better and better means for wholesale suicide. In view of the rapidly increasing avalanche of world population, we have already begun to seek ways and means of keeping the rising flood at bay. But nature may anticipate all our attempts by turning against man his own creative mind, and, by releasing the H-bomb or some equally catastrophic device, put an effective stop to overpopulation. In spite of our proud domination of nature we are still her victims as much as ever and have not even learnt to control our own nature, which slowly and inevitably courts disaster.

The necessary and needful reaction from the collective unconscious expresses itself in archetypally formed ideas. The meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one's own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is. For what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no one inside and no one outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad. It is a world of water, where all life floats in suspension; where the realm of the sympathetic system, the soul of everything living, begins; where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than-myself experiences me. No, the collective unconscious is anything but an encapsulated personal system; it is sheer objectivity, as wide as the world and open to all the world. There I am the object of every subject, in complete reversal of my ordinary consciousness, where I am always the subject that has an object. There I am utterly one with the world, so much a part of it that I forget all too easily who I really am. "Lost in oneself" is a good way of describing this state. But this self is the world, if only a consciousness could see it. That is why we must know who we are." ―from_Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious_

Whereas the neurosis and complaints that accompany it are never followed by the delicious feeling of good work well done, of a duty fearlessly performed, the suffering that comes from useful work, and from victory over real difficulties, brings with it those moments of peace and satisfaction which give the human being the priceless feeling that he has really lived his life.

... the kind of subliminal material from which the symbols of our dreams may be spontaneously produced. This subliminal material can consist of all urges, and intentions; all perceptions and intuitions; all rational or irrational thoughts, conclusions, inductions, deductions, and premises; and all varieties of feeling. Any or all of these can take the form of partial, temporary, aur constant unconsciousness.

But it is quite understandable that even the best of people are accessible to the idea of a state because, as I said, a state functions as something very real. You see, when the state claims to be like God’s finger creating order out of chaos, it is true to a certain extend; it is monstrous, not human, but a people in its wholeness is not human. It is a big animal, and therefore it needs another monster to tame it.

Dr. Carl Jung noted that some dreams were big dreams. Big dreams mean more than other dreams because they usually represent subconscious repeated attempts to either solve or warn about recurrent conflicts. A recurrent dream is virtually always a big dream. The subconscious is throwing out a warning that a major psychological conflict that occurred in the past is once again recurring in the dreamer’s present life. The

We should understand that dream symbols are for the most part manifestations of a psyche that is beyond the control of the conscious mind. Meaning and purposefulness are not the prerogatives of the mind; they operate in the whole of living nature. There is no difference in principle between organic and psychic growth. As a plant produces its flower, so the psyche creates its symbols. Every dream is evidence of this process.

The state is a terrible concretization,but if such things begin to concretize it is the very devil, as Nietzsche feels […] But surely the state is not the word of God. It is the invention of the many and therefore dangerous and poisonous; it is a devilish invention replacing the eternal plan of God that should rule the world. It is man instead of the divine competence, the limited mind instead of the infinite mind, things based upon temporal assumptions instead of upon eternal verities.

To a statistician, these numbers cannot be used to confirm anything, and so are valueless, because they are chance dispersions. But on psychological grounds I have discarded the idea that we are dealing with mere chance numbers. In a total picture of natural events, it is just as important to consider the exceptions to the rule as the averages. This is the fallacy of the statistical picture: it is one sided, inasmuch as is represents only the average aspect of reality and excludes the total picture. The statistical view of the world is a mere abstraction and their food incomplete and even fallacious, particularly so when it deals with man's psychology.

Quite apart from this general proposition, what kind of people seek these new combinations? They are the men of thought, who have finely-differentiated brains coupled with the sensitivity of a woman and the emotionality of a child. They are the slenderest, most delicate branches on the great tree of humanity: they bear the flower and the fruit. Many become brittle too soon, many break off. Differentiation creates in its progress the fit as well as the unfit; wits are mingled with nitwits—there are fools with genius and geniuses with follies, as Lombroso has remarked. One of the commonest and most usual marks of degeneracy is hysteria, the lack of self-control and self-criticism. Without succumbing to the pseudo-psychiatric witch-hunting of an author like Nordau,3 who sees fools everywhere, we can assert with confidence that unless the hysterical mentality is present to a greater or lesser degree genius is not possible. As Schopenhauer rightly says, the characteristic of the genius is great sensibility, something of the mimosa-like quality of the hysteric. Geniuses also have other qualities in common with hysterical persons.

Nada ejerce un efecto psíquico más fuerte sobre los hijos que la vida no vivida de sus padres” dice Carl G. Jung.

But the right way to wholeness is made up, unfortunately, of fateful detours and wrong turnings. It is the longissima via [longest path], not straight but snakelike, a path that unites the opposites in the manner of the guiding caduceus, a path whose labyrinthine twists and turns are not lacking in terrors

Cuando consigues despertar la Kundalini, para que empiece a moverse fuera de su mera potencialidad, necesariamente empiezas un Mundo que es totalmente diferente de nuestro Mundo. Es el Mundo de la Eternidad". - Carl Gustav Jung; extracto de "La Psicología del Kundalini Yoga: Notas del seminario impartido en 1932 por C. G. Jung

Like the kachinas, Barbie is both toy and mythic object—modern woman and Ur-woman—navelless, motherless, an incarnation of "the One Goddess with a Thousand Names." In the reservoir of communal memory that psychologist Carl Jung has termed the "collective unconscious," Barbie is an archetype of something ancient, matriarchal, and profound.

Children's dreams can be a preview of a whole human life, setting out a basic pattern of a life. ~Carl Jung, Reflections on the Life and Dreams of C.G. Jung, Page 254

Six weeks after his death my father appeared to me in a dream…It was an unforgettable experience, and it forced me for the first time to think about life after death. —CARL G. JUNG

Limar, Igor. “Carl G. Jung’s Synchronicity and Quantum Entanglement: Schrödinger’s Cat ‘Wanders’ Between Chromosomes.” NeuroQuantology 9, no. 2 (2011):

Como el psicólogo Carl G. Jung decía: «Mientras no logres transformar lo inconsciente en consciente, lo inconsciente guiará tu vida y tú lo llamarás destino».

Our life is indeed the same”: Carl Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 7: Two Essays in Analytical Psychology (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1972).

I gave up hypnotic treatment for this very reason, because I did not want to impose my will on others. I wanted the healing processes to grow out of the patient’s own personality, not from suggestions by me that would have only a passing effect. My aim was to protect and preserve my patient’s dignity and freedom, so that he could live his life according to his own wishes. In this exchange with Freud, it dawned on me for the first time that before we construct general theories about man and his psyche we should learn a lot more about the real human being we have to deal with.

It cannot be assumed that the analyst is a superman who is above such differences, just because he is a doctor who has acquired a psychological theory and a corresponding technique. He can only imagine himself to be superior in so far as he assumes that his theory and technique are absolute truths, capable of embracing the whole of the human psyche. Since such an assumption is more than doubtful, he cannot really be sure of it. Consequently, he will be assailed by secret doubts if he confronts the human wholeness of his patient with a theory or technique (which is merely a hypothesis or an attempt) instead of with his own living wholeness.

It is so convenient to be able to believe when one fears the effort of understanding.

Accordingly, whereas Hegel views the Absolute-Spirit as something wherein God’s will participates as the culmination of conscious development, Jung treats God’s acts within psychic subjective personal judgment and understanding. It is then understood that, despite striking similarities with the Hegelian dialectics, Jung deviates significantly from Hegel in his construal of wholeness/Self as full of conflicts – which appears to be defined only within a psychological antithesis-Other and not as an Other beyond psychic boundaries. Contrary to Jung, and to some extent closer to Maximus – that introduces a final union of opposites within the Logos’s principles – logoi – Hegel follows a more consistent and progressive approach to wholeness/Absolute. It is precisely what Jung was reluctant to fully embrace, being thus trapped into the crucial limitations of his own ambiguous epistemology.

compasión nace del reconocimiento de que cada uno de nosotros lo está haciendo tan bien como puede dentro de los límites de nuestras creencias y capacidades actuales. Que yo alimente a los hambrientos, perdone un insulto y ame al enemigo, estas son grandes virtudes. Pero si tuviera que descubrir que el más pobre entre los mendigos y el más imprudente entre los ofensores están todos dentro de mí, y que yo sobrevivo necesitando las limosnas de mi propia caridad; que yo mismo soy el enemigo que tiene que ser amado ... ¿Entonces qué?»152 Carl G. Jung