Carl Jung Quotations
The psyche is part of the inmost mystery of life, and it has its own peculiar structure and form like every other organism. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 187.
I am of the opinion that the psyche is the most tremendous fact of human life. Indeed, it is the mother of all human facts; of civilization and of its destroyer, war. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 206.
Emotions are instinctive, involuntary reactions which upset the rational order of consciousness by their elemental outbursts. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 497.
The archetype—let us never forget this—is a psychic organ present in all of us. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 271
Man must remain conscious of the world of the archetypes, because in it he is still a part of Nature and is connected with his own roots. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 174
It is a vessel which we can never empty, and never fill. It has a potential existence only, and when it takes shape in matter it is no longer what it was. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 301
The archetypes are imperishable elements of the unconscious, but they change their shape continually. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 301
A complex can be really overcome only if it is lived out to the full. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 184
The shadow is a living part of the personality and therefore wants to live with it in some form. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 44.
It 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.
For a woman, the typical danger emanating from the unconscious comes from above, from the “spiritual” sphere personified by the animus, whereas for a man it comes from the chthonic realm of the “world and woman,” i.e., the anima projected on to the world. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 559
The “child” is born out of the womb of the unconscious, begotten out of the depths of human nature, or rather out of living Nature herself. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 289
The urge and compulsion to self-realization is a law of nature and thus of invincible power, even though its effect, at the start, is insignificant
and improbable. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 289
The “eternal” child in man is an indescribable experience, an incongruity, a handicap, and a divine prerogative; an imponderable that determines the ultimate worth or worthlessness of a personality. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 300
For the conscious mind knows nothing beyond the opposites and, as a result, has no knowledge of the thing that unites them. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 285
The grand plan on which the unconscious life of the psyche is constructed is so inaccessible to our understanding that we can never know what evil may not be necessary in order to produce good by enantiodromia, and what good may very possibly lead to evil. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 397
In the history of symbols this tree is described as the way of life itself, a growing into that which eternally is and does not change; which springs from the union of opposites and, by its eternal presence, also makes that union possible. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 198
It seems as if it were only through an experience of symbolic reality that man, vainly seeking his own “existence” and making a philosophy out of it, can find his way back to a world in which he is no longer a stranger. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 198
For the alchemists the process of individuation represented by the opus was an analogy of the creation of the world, and the opus itself an analogy of God’s work of creation. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 550
How often in the critical moments of life everything hangs on what appears to be a mere nothing! ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 408
Animals generally signify the instinctive forces of the unconscious, which are brought into unity within the mandala. This integration of the instincts is a prerequisite for individuation. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 660.
The souls or spirits of the dead are identical with the psychic activity of the living; they merely continue it. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 38
A neurosis is truly removed only when it has removed the false attitude of the ego. We do not cure it—it cures us. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 361
A man is ill, but the illness is nature’s attempt to heal him. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 361
From the illness itself we can learn so much for our recovery, and what the neurotic flings away as absolutely worthless contains the true gold we should never have found elsewhere. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 361