Carl Jung Quotations
The deeper ‘layers’ of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat further and further into darkness. . . . they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body’s materiality. . . . Hence ‘at bottom’ the psyche is simply ‘world. ~Carl Jung; The Special Phenomenology of the Child Archetype.
. . . the spirit is the life of the body seen from within, and the body the outward manifestation of the life of the spirit – the two being really one. ~Carl Jung; The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man; CW 10: 195.
The world of gods and spirits is truly ‘nothing but’ the collective unconscious inside me. ~Carl Jung; On ‘The Tibetan Book of the Dead; CW 11; Page 857.
The important thing is what he [a man] talks about, not whether he agrees with it or not. ~Carl Jung; CW 5: 99
The primordial image, or archetype, is a figure–be it a daemon, a human being, or a process–that constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. . . . In each of these images there is a little piece of human psychology and human fate, a remnant of the joys and sorrows that have been repeated countless times in our ancestral history. . . . ~Carl Jung; On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry; CW 15; 127.
. . . Christianity slumbers and has neglected to develop its myth further in the course of the centuries. . . . Our myth has become mute, and gives no answers. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Chapter 12.
The sea is the favorite symbol for the unconscious, the mother of all that lives. ~Carl Jung; Special Phenomenology; Part IV; Psyche & Symbol.
. . . poets . . . create from the very depths of the collective unconscious, voicing aloud what others only dream. ~Carl Jung; CW 6: 323.
In some way or other we are part of a single, all-embracing psyche, a single “greatest man.” ~Carl Jung; The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man; CW 10: 175.
Before the bar of nature and fate, unconsciousness is never accepted as an excuse; on the contrary there are very severe penalties for it. ~Carl Jung; Answer to Job; CW 11; Psychology and Religion: West and East; Page 608.
Rationalism and superstition are complementary. It is a psychological rule that the brighter the light, the blacker the shadow; in other words, the more rationalistic we are in our conscious minds, the more alive becomes the spectral world of the unconscious. ~Spuk: Irrglaube oder Wahrglaube? ; Foreword by C. G. Jung; In CW 18: P. 10.
The unconscious is not a demoniacal monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgment go, is completely neutral. It only becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree that we repress it, its danger increases. ~Carl Jung; The Practical Use of Dream Analysis; CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy; Page 329.
Anyone who penetrates into the unconscious with purely biological assumptions will become stuck in the instinctual sphere and be unable to advance beyond it, for he will be pulled back again and again into physical existence. ~Carl Jung; The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Psychological commentary; CW 11; Psychology and Religion: West and East; Page 843.
Only what is really oneself has the power to heal. ~Carl Jung; CW 7: 258
We know that the mask of the unconscious is not rigid—it reflects the face we turn towards it. Hostility lends it a threatening aspect, friendliness softens its features. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 29
The unconscious is the only available source of religious experience. This in certainly not to say that what we call the unconscious is identical with God or is set up in his place. It is simply the medium from which religious experience seems to flow. As to what the further cause of such experience might be, the answer to this lies beyond the range of human knowledge. Knowledge of God is a transcendental problem. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self.
Empirical psychology loved, until recently, to explain the “unconscious” as mere absence of consciousness-the term itself indicates as much-just as shadow is an absence of light. Today accurate observation of unconscious processes has recognized, with all other ages before us, that the unconscious possesses a creative autonomy such as a mere shadow could never be endowed with. Carl Jung; CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East; Page 14.
The unconscious mind of man sees correctly even when conscious reason is blind and impotent. ~Carl Jung; Answer to Job; CW 11; Psychology and Religion: West and East; Page 608.
Nobody can say where man ends. That is the beauty of it. The unconscious of man can reach God knows where. There we are going to make discoveries. ~Four Filmed Interviews with Richard I. Evans” (1957). Conversations with Carl Jung.
Any attempt to determine the nature of the unconscious state runs up against the same difficulties as atomic physics: the very act of observation alters the object observed. Consequently, there is at present no way of objectively determining the real nature of the unconscious. ~ Carl Jung; Mysterium Coniunctionis; CW 14; Page 88.
The unconscious is the unwritten history of mankind from time unrecorded. ~Carl Jung; A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity; In CW 11; Psychology and Religion: West and East; Page 280.
The man who has attained consciousness of the present is solitary. The “modern” man has at all times been so, for every step towards fuller consciousness removes him further from his original, purely animal participation mystique with the herd, from submersion in a common unconsciousness. Every step forward means tearing oneself loose from the maternal womb of unconsciousness in which the mass of men dwells. ~Carl Jung; “The Spiritual Problems of Modern Man” (1928). In CW 10: Civilization in Transition. P. 150
The new attitude gained in the course of analysis tends sooner or later to become inadequate in one way or another, and necessarily so, because the flow of life again and again demands fresh adaptation. Adaptation is never achieved once and for all.…In the last resort it is highly improbable that there could ever be a therapy which got rid of all difficulties. Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health. What concerns us here is only an excessive amount of them. ~Carl Jung; CW 9; The Transcendent Function.
Just as a man as a social being, cannot in the long run exist without a tie to the community, so the individual will never find the real justification for his existence, and his own spiritual and moral autonomy, anywhere except in an extramundane principle capable of relativizing the overpowering influence of external factors. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 23.
If one honors God, the sun or the fire, then one honors one’s own vital force, the libido. It is a Seneca says: “god is near you, he is with you, in you.” God is our own longing to which we pay divine honors. ~Carl Jung; The Psychology of the Unconscious.
Even if we did not know by reason our need for salt in our food, we should nonetheless profit from its use. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 76
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 Jung; The Undiscovered Self, Chapter 4
It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of a few little weaknesses and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible that he should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster’s body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost.
Having a dark suspicion of these grim possibilities, man turns a blind eye to the shadow-side of human nature. Blindly he strives against the salutary dogma of original sin, which is yet so prodigiously true. Yes, he even hesitates to admit the conflict of which he is so painfully aware. ~Carl Jung; On the Psychology of the Unconscious; CW 7; Two Essays on Analytical Psychology; Page 35.
It is no easy matter to live a life that is modeled on Christ’s, but it is unspeakably harder to live one’s own life as truly as Christ lived his. Anyone who did this would run counter to the conditions of his own history, and though he might thus be fulfilling them, he would nonetheless be misjudged, derided, tortured and crucified. ~Carl Jung; CW 11; Psychology and Religion; Page 340; Para 522.
When I was working on the stone tablets, I became aware of the fateful links between me and my ancestors. I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children.
It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished. It is difficult to determine whether these questions are more of a personal or more of a general (collective) nature. It seems to me that the latter is the case. A collective problem, if not recognized as such, always appears as a personal problem, and in individual cases may give the impression that something is out of order in the realm of the personal psyche.
The personal sphere is indeed disturbed, but such disturbances need not be primary; they may well be secondary, the consequence of an insupportable change in the social atmosphere. The cause of disturbance is, therefore, not to be sought in the personal surroundings, but rather in the collective situation. Psychotherapy has hitherto taken this matter far too little into account. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams, Reflections; Pages 233-234.
Dreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche, outside the control of the will. They are pure nature; they show us the unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature when our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impasse. ~Carl Jung; The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man; CW 10; Civilization in Transition; Page 317.
The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand diem, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams Reflections; Page 193.
Once we have freed ourselves from the prejudice that we have to refer to concepts of external experience or to a priori categories of reason, we can turn our attention and curiosity wholly to that strange and unknown thing we call spirit. ~Carl Jung; Spirit and Life; CW 8; Paragraph 626
From the psychological point of view, the phenomenon of spirit, like every autonomous complex, appears as an intention of the unconscious superior to, or at least on a par with, intentions of the ego. If we are to do justice to the essence of the thing we call spirit, we should really speak of a “higher” consciousness rather than of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung; Spirit and Life; CW 8, par. 643.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for 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 Jung; Aion; CW 9; Part II; Page 14.
The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semihuman, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, “divine.” ~Carl Jung; The Practice of Psychotherapy; Page 364.
One must give up the retrospective longing which only wants to resuscitate the torpid bliss and effortlessness of childhood. ~Carl Jung; The Sacrifice; CW 5; Paragraph 643.
Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche. This is the World Power that vastly exceeds all other powers on earth. The Age of Enlightenment, which stripped nature and human institutions of gods, overlooked the God of Terror who dwells in the human soul. ~Carl Jung; The Development of Personality.
Because the anima wants life, she wants both good and bad. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i; Paragraph 59.
Whoever carries over into the afternoon the law of the morning, or the natural aim, must pay for it with damage to his soul, just as surely as a growing youth who tries to carry over his childish egoism into adult life must pay for this mistake with social failure. ~Carl Jung; In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche; The Stages of Life; Page 787.
Anyone who has lost the historical symbols and cannot be satisfied with substitutes is certainly in a very difficult position today: before him there yawns the void, and he turns away from it in horror. What is worse, the vacuum gets filled with absurd political and social ideas, which one and all are distinguished by their spiritual bleakness.
But if he cannot get along with these pedantic dogmatisms, he sees himself forced to be serious for once with his alleged trust in God, though it usually turns out that his fear of things going wrong if he did so is even more persuasive. ~Carl Jung; Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious; CW 9; Part I: Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious; Page 28.
There is nothing without spirit, for spirit seems to be the inside of things … inside is spirit, which is the soul of objects. Whether this is our psyche or the psyche of the universe we don’t know, but if one touches the earth one cannot avoid the spirit. ~Carl Jung; The Vision Seminars; Pages 164-165.
What is it, in the end, that induces a man to go his own way and to rise out of unconscious identity with the mass. . . ? Is it what is commonly called vocation . . . [which] acts like a law of God from which there is no escape. . . . Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is called. ~Carl Jung; The Development of the Personality, CW 17, pars. 299f.
Instincts…are highly conservative and of extreme antiquity as regards both their dynamism and their form. Their forms, when represented to the mind, appears as an image which expresses the nature of the instinctive impulse visually and concretely, like a picture … ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self.
The divine process of change manifests itself to our human understanding . . . as punishment, torment, death, and transfiguration. ~Carl Jung; Alchemical Studies.
The world comes into being when man discovers it. But he only discovers it when he sacrifices his containment in the primal mother, the original state of unconsciousness. ~Carl Jung; Symbols of Transformation; CW 5: P.652.
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; Modern Man in Search of a Soul
When a summit of life is reached, when the bud unfolds and from the lesser the greater emerges, then, as Nietzsche says, ‘One becomes Two,’ and the greater figure, which one always was but which remained invisible, appears to the lesser personality with the force of a revelation . . . –a moment of deadliest peril! ~Carl Jung; The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
Consciousness is a very recent acquisition of nature, and it is still in an “experimental” state. It is frail . . . and easily injured. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 6.
It is commonly assumed that on some given occasion in prehistoric times, the basic mythological ideas were “invented” by a clever old philosopher or prophet, and ever afterward “believed” by a credulous and uncritical people. But the very word “invent” is derived from the Latin invenire, and means “to find” and hence to find something by “seeking” it. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 69.
The problem of crucifixion is the beginning of individuation; there is the secret meaning of the Christian symbolism, a path of blood and suffering. ~Carl Jung; Quoted in Aspects of Jung’s Personality and Work by Gerhard Adler
Many people mistakenly overestimate the role of will power and think that nothing can happen to their minds that they do not decide and intend. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; P. 22
This is what happens very frequently about the midday of life, and in this wise our miraculous human nature enforces the transition that leads from the first half of life to the second. It is a metamorphosis from a state in which man is only a tool of instinctive nature, to another in which he is no longer a tool, but himself: a transformation of nature into culture, of instinct into spirit. ~Carl Jung; CW17, § 335.
When the medical psychologist takes an interest in symbols, he is primarily concerned with “natural” symbols, as distinct from “cultural” symbols. The former are derived from the unconscious . . . the cultural on the other hand . . . used to express “eternal truths”, and . . . still used in many religions. Page 83.
We can find clear proof of this fact in the history of science itself. The so-called “mystical” experience of the French philosopher Descartes involved a . . . sudden revelation in which he saw in a flash the “order of all sciences”. The British author Robert Louis Stevenson had spent years looking for a story that would fit his “strong sense of man’s double being,” when the plot of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was suddenly revealed to him in a dream. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; P. 25.
A remarkable instance of this can be found in the Eleusinian mysteries, which were finally suppressed in the beginning of the seventh century of the Christian era. They expressed, together with the Delphic oracle, the essence and spirit of ancient Greece. On a much greater scale, the Christian era itself owes its name and significance to the antique mystery of the god-man, which has its roots in the archetypal Osiris-Horus myth of ancient Egypt. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; P. 68.
[The Holy Ghost descending at Pentecost brings about for the individual] not an ‘imitation of Christ’ but its exact opposite: an assimilation of the Christ-image to his own self. . . . It is no longer an effort, an intentional straining after imitation, but rather an involuntary experience of the reality represented by the sacred legend. ~Carl Jung; Mysterium Coniunctionis
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