Carl Jung Quotations
Our will is a function regulated by reflection; hence it is dependent on the quality of that reflection. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 462
Moreover, is it not essential to the true art of living, sometimes, in defiance of all reason and fitness, to include the unreasonable and the unfitting within the ambiance of the possible? ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 462
What if there were a living agency beyond our everyday human world—something even more purposeful than electrons? ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 148
Do we delude ourselves in thinking that we possess and control our own psyches, and is what science calls the “psyche” not just a question-mark arbitrarily confined within the skull, but rather a door that opens upon the human world from a world beyond, allowing unknown and mysterious powers to act upon man and carry him on the wings of the night to a more than personal destiny. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 148
In the realm of consciousness we are our own masters; we seem to be the “factors” themselves. But if we step through the door of the shadow we discover with terror that we are the objects of unseen factors, ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 49
There are times in the world’s history—and our own time may be one of them—when good must stand aside, so that anything destined to be better first appears in evil form. Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 321
Evil needs to be pondered just as much as good, for good and evil are ultimately nothing but ideal extensions and abstractions of doing, and both belong to the chiaroscuro of life. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 36
Besides, where would the fear of God be if only good—i.e., what seems good to us—were to be expected from him. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 291
The view that good and evil are spiritual principles outside us, and that man is caught in the conflict between them is more bearable by far than the insight that the opposites are the ineradicable and indispensable preconditions of all psychic life, so much so that life itself is guilt. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 530
The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 305
We know that the wildest and most moving dramas are played not in the theatre but in the hearts of ordinary men and women who pass by without exciting attention, and who betray to the world nothing of the conflicts that rage within them except possibly by a nervous breakdown. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 425
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. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 134
Taking it in its deepest sense, the shadow is the invisible saurian tail that man still drags behind him. Carefully amputated, it becomes the healing serpent of the mysteries. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 93
He lives in the “House of the Gathering.” Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 140
It [Shadow] is the 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. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 45
Solicitude for the spiritual welfare of the erring sheep can explain even a Torquemada. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 391
He who cannot love can never transform the serpent, and then nothing is changed. ~Carl Jung, Basel Seminar, Para 87
It is no easy matter to live a life that is modelled on Christ’s, but it is unspeakably harder to live one’s own life as truly as Christ lived his. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 522
Restlessness begets meaninglessness, and the lack of meaning in life is a soul-sickness whose full extent and full import our age has not as yet begun to comprehend. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 815
But all creativeness in the realm of the spirit as well as every psychic advance of man arises from the suffering of the soul, and the cause of the suffering is spiritual stagnation, or psychic sterility. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 497
Each individual is a new experiment of life in her ever-changing moods, and an attempt at a new solution or new adaptation. ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 173
If only we could understand all this impersonally—could understand that we are not the personal creators of our truths, but only their exponents, mere mouthpieces of the day’s psychic needs, then much venom and bitterness might be spared and we should be able to perceive the profound and supra-personal continuity of the human mind. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 156
The test of a firm conviction is its elasticity and flexibility; like every other exalted truth it thrives best on the admission of its errors. ~Carl Jung, 16, Para 180
Often it is just as well that we do not know the danger we escape when we rush in where angels fear to tread. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 247
The existence of ego consciousness has meaning only if it is free and autonomous. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 391
Only through our feebleness and incapacity are we linked up with the unconscious, with the lower world of the instincts and with our fellow beings. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 109