Carl jung quotes

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

Where love stops, power begins, and violence, and terror

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.

If our religion is based on salvation, our chief emotions will be fear and trembling. If our religion is based on wonder, our chief emotion will be gratitude.

I've realized that somebody who's tired and needs a rest, and goes on working all the same is a fool.

In every adult there lurks a child— an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education. That is the part of the personality which wants to develop and become whole.

Dawn is born at midnight.

The descent into the depths always seems to precede the ascent.

The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.

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

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

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn the literature of the whole world - all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls.

Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfill the way that is in you.

Intuition is one of the four basic psychological functions along with thinking, feeling,and sensing.

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

It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.

The most dangerous things in the world are immense accumulations of human beings who are manipulated by only a few heads.

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

In order to know the light, we must first experience the darkness.

Perfection belongs to the Gods; the most we can hope for is excellence.

The world will ask you who you are, and if you don't know, the world will tell you.

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

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

Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the Shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.

Only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the "treasure hard to attain." He alone has a genuine claim to self-confidence, for he has faced the dark ground of his self and thereby has gained himself. This experience gives him faith and trust.

All fanaticism is repressed doubt.

The difference between a good life and a bad life is how well you walk through the fire

Life really does begin at forty. Up until then, you are just doing research.

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

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. 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.

The man who promises everything is sure to fulfil nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition.

Enlightenment doesnt occur from sitting around visualizing images of light, but from integrating the darker aspects of the Self into the conscious personality.

God enters through the wound.

If there is a fear of falling, the only safety consists in deliberately jumping.

Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next.

To be normal is the ultimate aim of the unsuccessful.

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

Everyone you meet knows something you don't know but need to know. Learn from them.

Be grateful for your difficulties and challenges, for they hold blessings. In fact... Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health personal growth, individuation and self-actualisation.

Much of the evil in the world is due to the fact that man in general is hopelessly unconscious.

That which we do not confront in ourselves we will meet as fate.

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

Life calls not for perfection, but for completeness.

One is always in the dark about one's own personality. One needs others to get to know oneself.

Life is something that has to be lived and not talked about.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.

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

Trust that which gives you meaning and accept it as your guide

When you are up against a wall, put down roots like a tree, until clarity comes from deeper sources to see over that wall and grow.

The most important question anyone can ask is: What myth am I living?

The more veiled becomes the outside world, steadily losing in colour, tone and passions, the more urgently the inner world calls us

If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance towards oneself can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures.

Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see.

When goals go, meaning goes. When meaning goes, purpose goes. When purpose goes, life goes dead on our hands.

No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.

I could not say I believe. I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God.

A man's hatred is always concentrated upon that which makes him conscious of his bad qualities.

Nothing is possible without love ... For love puts one in a mood to risk everything.

The ability to ask questions is the greatest resource in learning the truth.

The artist's life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him [or her]-on the one hand, the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life, and on the other a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire ... There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire.

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.

Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.

Words are animals, alive with a will of their own

What you resist persist.

You must go in quest of yourself, and you will find yourself again only in the simple and forgotten things.

Normality is a fine ideal for those who have no imagination.

We discover ourselves through others.

In each of us is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves.

What did you do as a child that made that hours pass like minutes? [Herein lies the key to your earthy pursuits.]

It is a bewildering thing in human life that the things that cause the greatest fear is the source of the greatest wisdom.

Twelve experts gathered in one room equal one big idiot.

I cannot prove to you that God exists, but my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern in the individual has at its disposal the greatest transforming energies of which life is capable. Find this pattern in your own individual self and life is transformed.

Invited or not, God is present.

Embrace your grief. For there, your soul will grow.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

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 of 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.

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

Wisdom accepts that all things have two sides

We don't really heal anything; we simply let it go.

Real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full.

Mind and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing.

The experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego.

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. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.

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

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

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

Conflict exists strictly as an opportunity to raise our consciousness.

The greater the contrast, the greater the potential. Great energy only comes from a correspondingly great tension of opposites.

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

Never do human beings speculate more, or have more opinions, than about things which they do not understand.

The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.

Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often a torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words.

The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.

Nothing affects the life of a child so much as the unlived life of its parent

I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole.

As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.

I cannot define for you what God is. I can only say that my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern has at its disposal the greatest of all his energies for transformation and transfiguration of his natural being. Not only the meaning of his life but his renewal and his institutions depend on his conscious relationship with this pattern of his collective unconscious.

It is only our deeds that reveal who we are.

VOCATUS ATQUE NON VOCATUS DEUS ADERIT.

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

We are not what happened to us, we are what we wish to become.

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness's of other people. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely. Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead.

Intuition is perception via the unconscious that brings forth ideas, images, new possibilities and ways out of blocked situations.

Perhaps, I myself am the enemy who needs to be loved.

The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological order, but psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions which are nothing other than psychic epidemics. At any moment several million human beings may be smitten with a new madness, and then we shall have another world war or devastating revolution. 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.

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

You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

We don't so much solve our problems as we outgrow them. We add capacities and experiences that eventually make us bigger than the problems.

Enchantment is the oldest form of medicine.

One finds one's destiny on the path one takes to avoid it.

The greatest sin is to be unconscious.

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

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. Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart ... Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens. The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.

Loneliness does not come 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.

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.

The whole point of Jesus's life was not that we should become exactly like him, but that we should become ourselves in the same way he became himself. Jesus was not the great exception but the great example.

A man likes to believe that he is the master of his soul. But as long as he is unable to control his moods and emotions, or to be conscious of the myriad secret ways in which unconscious factors insinuate themselves into his arrangements and decisions, he is certainly not his own master.

The sad truth is that man's real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites - day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end.

Our world has become dehumanized. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature.

Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries.

We don't get wounded alone and we don't heal alone.

You always become the thing you fight the most.