Jung Quotes

''The unconscious is nature,

and nature never lies.''

Carl Jung

''The purest product of the unconscious is the dream.''

Carl Jung

''Dreams provide you with the most interesting information

if only you take the trouble to understand their symbols.''

Carl Jung

''The unconscious is nature,

which never deceives:

only we deceive ourselves.''

Carl Jung

''Anyone who is in bad odour with himself

and feels in need of improvement,

anyone who in brief wishes to “grow”,

must take counsel with himself.

Unless you change yourself inwardly too,

outward changes in the situation are worthless

or even harmful.''

Carl Jung

''Man is a very complicated being,

and though he knows a great deal about all sorts of things,

he knows very little about himself.''

Carl Jung

''People still go on despising what they don’t know,

and what they know least of all

they claim to know best.''

Carl Jung

''When a man lacks self knowledge

he can do the most astonishing or terrible things

without calling himself to account

and without ever suspecting what he is doing.''

Carl Jung

'‘A neurosis originates in a conflict between consciousness and the personal unconscious,

whereas a psychosis has deeper roots and consists in a conflict involving the collective unconscious.’'

Carl Jung

''Man lives in a state of continual conflict

between the truth of the external world

in which he has been placed

and the inner truth of the psyche

that connects him with the source of life.

He is pulled now to one side and now to the other

until he has learnt to see that he has obligations to both.''

Carl Jung

''The great majority of dreams contain mainly personal material,

and their protagonists are the ego and the shadow.

(…)

There are, however, comparatively rare dreams

(the ‘’big’’ dreams of primitives)

which contain clearly recognizable mythological motifs.''

Carl Jung

''Nobody can fall so low

unless he has a great depth.''

Carl Jung

''The more evil a person is,

the more he tries to force upon others

the wickedness he does not want to show to the outside world.''

Carl Jung

''The greatest enigma in the world,

and the one that is closest to us,

is man himself.''

Carl Jung

''Measure not by money or power!

Peace of soul means more.''

Carl Jung

''[A famous scientist] set out to see what the unconscious said to him,

and it gave him a wonderful lead.

That man got into order again

because he gradually accepted the symbolic data,

and now he leads the religious life,

the life of the careful observer.

Religion is careful observation of the data.

He now observes all the things that are brought him by his dreams;

that is his only guidance.''

Carl Jung

''The chief trouble seems to be

that the intellect escaped the control of man and became his obsession,

instead of remaining the obedient tool in the hands of a creator,

shaping his world,

adorning it with the colorful images of his mind.''

Carl Jung

''There is no conflict between religion and science.

That is a very old-fashioned idea.

Science has to consider what there is.

There is religion,

and it is one of the most essential manifestations of the human mind.

It is a fact,

and science has nothing to say about it;

it simply has to confirm that there is that fact.

(...)

Science cannot establish a religious truth.

A religious truth is essentially an experience,

it is not an opinion.

Religion is absolute,

it cannot be discussed.''

Carl Jung

''No science can establish truth.''

Carl Jung

''[Science] has filtered down into the lower strata of the population,

and has worked no end of evil.

When the asses catch hold of science, that is awful.

Those are the great mental epidemics of our time;

they are all insane, the whole crowd!''

Carl Jung

''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.

And it is indeed obvious that rationality is in large measure an apotropaic defense against superstition,

which is ever present and unavoidable.

The daemonic world of primitives is only a few generations away from us,

and the things that have happened

and still go on happening in the dictator states

teach us how terrifyingly close it is.''

Carl Jung

''The very attempt to bring some kind of order into the chaos of psychological experience

is considered ''unscientific'',

because the criteria of physical reality cannot be applied directly to psychic reality.''

Carl Jung

''Reason becomes unreason when separated from the heart.''

Carl Jung

''The will of God often contradicts conscious principles

however good they may seem.''

Carl Jung

''Know, see and hear,

and you will wisely remark that the most splendid, sublime and precious mysteries

are hidden beneath the beauties of Love,

from which they issue anew,

for Love is the joyful soul of everything that lives.''

Carl Jung

''Our time is concerned with a monster

completely grown up and so fat

that it can easily begin to devour itself.''

Carl Jung

''Unconscious actions are always taken for granted

and are therefore not critically evaluated.

One fails to see what one does oneself

and seeks in others the cause of all the consequences

that follow from one’s own actions.''

Carl Jung

''Much too often people have a pathetic cocksureness

which leads them into nothing but foolishness.

It is better to be unsure

because one then becomes more modest,

more humble.''

Carl Jung

''Our life is unsure,

and therefore a feeling of unsureness is much nearer to the truth

than the illusion and the bluff of sureness.''

Carl Jung

''If we seek genuine psychological understanding of the human being of our own time,

we must know his spiritual history absolutely.

We cannot reduce him to mere biological data,

since he is not by nature merely biological

but he is a product also of spiritual presuppositions.''

Carl Jung

''As understanding deepens,

the further removed it becomes from knowledge.''

Carl Jung

''Goodness is an individual gift and an individual acquisition.

In the form of mass suggestion it is mere intoxication,

which has never yet been counted a virtue.

Goodness is acquired only by the individual as his own achievement.

No masses can do it for him.

But evil needs masses for its genesis and continued existence.

(...)

The undoubtedly successful method of mass suggestion,

which unfortunately works best only when you want to make something slide downhill or collapse.

All that can be built with it are houses of cards

or concentration camps

or death pits.''

Carl Jung

''What we need are a few illuminating truths,

but no articles of faith.

Where an intelligible truth works,

it finds in faith a willing ally;

for faith has always helped

when thinking and understanding could not quite make the grade.

Understanding is never the handmaiden of faith - on the contrary,

faith completes understanding.

To educate men to a faith they do not understand

is doubtless a well-meant undertaking,

but one runs the risk of creating an attitude that believes everything it does not understand.

(...)

It is so convenient to be able to believe

when one fears the effort of understanding.''

Carl Jung

''Every totalitarian claim gradually isolates itself

because it excludes so many people as

“defectors, lost, fallen, apostate, heretic,” and so forth.

The totalitarian maneuvers himself into a corner,

no matter how large its original following.''

Carl Jung

''Finally, even the truth can spread

and not only the popular lie.''

Carl Jung

''Where love stops,

power begins,

and violence,

and terror.''

Carl Jung

''Each individual chooses a guiding line as a basic pattern for the organization of all psychic contents.

Among the possible guiding fictions,

Adler attached special importance to the winning of superiority and power over others,

the urge ‘’to be on top’’.

The original source of this misguided ambition lies in a deep-rooted feeling of inferiority,

necessitating an over-compensation in the form of security.''

Carl Jung

''It is certainly no ideal for people always to remain childish,

to live in a perpetual state of delusions about themselves,

foisting everything they dislike on to their neighbors

and plaguing them with their prejudices and projections. ''

Carl Jung

''A visible enemy is always better than an invisible one.''

Carl Jung

''The difficulties of our psychotherapeutic work teach us

to take truth, goodness and beauty where we find them.

They are not always found where we look for them:

often they are hidden in the dirt or are in the keeping of the dragon.

But it does not transfigure the dirt

and does not diminish the evil any more than these lessen God’s gifts.

The contrast is painful and the paradox bewildering.''

Carl Jung

''A complex becomes pathological

only when we think we have not got it.''

Carl Jung

''More than once a patient has admitted to me

that he has learned to accept his neurotic symptoms with gratitude,

because, like a barometer,

they invariably told him when and where he was straying from his individual path,

and also wether he had let important things remain unconscious.''

Carl Jung

''Psyche and matter exist in one and the same world,

and each partakes of the other,

otherwise any reciprocal action would be impossible.''

Carl Jung

''God unfolds himself in the world in the form of syzygies (paired opposites),

such as heaven/earth, day/night, male/female, etc.

The last term of the first series is the Adam/Eve syzygy.

At the end of this fragmentation process there follows the return to the beginning,

the consummation of the universe through purification and annihilation.''

Carl Jung

''The ever-widening split between conscious and unconscious

increases the danger of psychic infection and mass psychosis.

With the loss of symbolic ideas the bridge to the unconscious has broken down.

Instinct no longer affords protection against unsound ideas and empty slogans.

Rationality without tradition and without a basis in instinct is proof against no absurdity.''

Carl Jung

''Naturally the present tendency to destroy all traditions or render it unconscious

could interrupt the normal process of development for several hundreds of years

and substitute an interlude of barbarism.

Wherever the Marxist utopia prevails, this has already happened.

But a predominantly scientific and technological education,

such as is the usual thing nowadays,

can also bring about a spiritual regression

and a considerable increase of psychic dissociation.''

Carl Jung

''Loss of roots and lack of tradition

neuroticize the masses

and prepare them for collective hysteria.''

Carl Jung

''Myths and fairytales give expression to unconscious processes,

and their retelling causes these processes to come alive again and be recollected,

thereby re-establishing the connection between conscious and unconscious.

What the separation of the two psychic halves means,

the psychiatrist knows only too well.

He knows it as dissociation of the personality,

the root of all neuroses:

the conscious goes to the right and the unconscious to the left.

As opposites never unite at their own level,

a supraordinate “third” is always required,

in which the two parts can come together.

And since the symbol derives as much from the conscious as from the unconscious,

it is able to unite them both,

reconciling their conceptual polarity through its numinosity.''

Carl Jung

''[Christianity] doesn’t use a dead foreign language in the literal sense,

but it speaks in images that on the one hand are hoary with age and look deceptively familiar,

while on the other hand they are miles away from a modern man’s conscious understanding,

addressing themselves, at most, to his unconscious,

and then only if the speaker’s whole soul is in his work.

The best that can happen, therefore, is that the effect remains stuck in the sphere of feeling,

though in most cases it does not get even that far.''

Carl Jung

''For the alchemist it was clear that the “centre”,

or what we would call the Self,

does not lie in the ego but is outside it,

“in us” yet not “in our mind”,

being located in that which we unconsciously are,

the “quid” which we still have to recognize.

Today we would call it the unconscious which enables us to recognize the shadow

and an impersonal unconscious which enables us to recognize the archetypal symbol of the Self.''

Carl Jung

''It is so extremely important to tell children fairy tales and legends,

and to inculcate religious ideas (dogmas) into grown-ups,

because these things are instrumental symbols

with whose help unconscious contents can be canalized into consciousness,

interpreted, and integrated.

Failing this, their energy flows off into conscious contents

which, normally, are not much emphasized,

and intensifies them to pathological proportions.

We then get apparently groundless phobia’s and obsessions-crazes,

idiosyncrasies, hypochondriac ideas, and intellectual perversions

suitably camouflaged in social, religious, or political garb.''

Carl Jung

''The secret is first and foremost IN man;

it is his true self, which he does not know,

but learns to know by experience of outward things.''

Carl Jung

''Today humanity, as never before, is split into two apparently irreconcilable halves.

The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious,

it happens outside, as fate.

That is to say, when the individual remains undivided

and does not become conscious of his inner opposite,

the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.''

Carl Jung

''If metaphysical ideas no longer have such a fascinating effect as before,

this is certainly not due to any lack of primitivity in the European psyche,

but simply and solely to the fact that the erstwhile symbols no longer express

what is now welling up from the unconscious as the end-result of the development

of Christian consciousness through the centuries.

This end-result is a true antimimon pneuma,

a false spirit of arrogance, hysteria, woolly-mindedness,

criminal amorality, and doctrinaire fanaticism, a purveyor of shoddy spiritual goods,

spurious art, philosophical stutterings, and Utopian humbug,

fit only to be fed wholesale to the mass man of today.

That is what the post-Christian spirit looks like.''

Carl Jung

''The more civilized, the more unconscious and complicated a man is,

the less he is able to follow his instincts.

His complicated living conditions and the influence of his environment

are so strong that they drown the quiet voice of nature.

Opinions, beliefs, theories, and collective tendencies appear in its stead

and back up all the aberrations of the conscious mind.

Deliberate attention should then be given to the unconscious

so that the compensation can set to work.''

Carl Jung

''The unconscious as we know can never be “done with” once and for all.

It is, in fact, one of the most important tasks of psychic hygiene

to pay continual attention to the symptomatology

of unconscious contents and processes,

for the good reason that the conscious mind is always in danger

of becoming one-sided, of keeping to well-worn paths

and getting stuck in blind alleys.

The complementary and compensating function of the unconscious

ensures that these dangers, which are especially great in neurosis,

can in some measure be avoided.''

Carl Jung

''When animus and anima meet,

the animus draws his sword of power

and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction.''

Carl Jung

''That the highest summit of life

can be expressed through the symbolism

of death is a well-known fact,

for any growing beyond oneself means death.''

Carl Jung

''No man can change himself into anything from sheer reason;

he can only change into what he potentially is.''

Carl Jung

The really dangerous people

are not the great heretics and unbelievers,

but the swarm of petty thinkers,

the rationalizing intellectuals,

who suddenly discover how irrational all religious dogmas are.

Carl Jung

''In neurosis there is never an actual loss of reality,

only a falsification of it.''

Carl Jung

''Only and infantile person can pretend that evil is not at work everywhere,

and the more unconscious he is, the more the devil drives him.

It is just because of this inner connection with the black side of things

that it is so incredibly easy for the mass man to commit the most appalling crimes without thinking.

Only ruthless self-knowledge on the widest scale,

which sees good and evil in correct perspective,

and can weigh up the motives of human action,

offers some guarantee that the end-result will not turn out too badly.''