Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Swiss psychologist Carl Jung.
Last updated on November 22, 2024.
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, and religious studies. Jung worked as a research scientist at the famous Burghölzli hospital, under Eugen Bleuler. During this time, he came to the attention of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. The two men conducted a lengthy correspondence and collaborated, for a while, on a joint vision of human psychology.
Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.
Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.
The word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.
Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.
Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
The collective unconscious consists of the sum of the instincts and their correlates, the archetypes. Just as everybody possesses instincts, so he also possesses a stock of archetypal images.
It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.
It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.
Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.
There is no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert. Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum.
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.
A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life's morning.
We shall probably get nearest to the truth if we think of the conscious and personal psyche as resting upon the broad basis of an inherited and universal psychic disposition which is as such unconscious, and that our personal psyche bears the same relation to the collective psyche as the individual to society.
We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.
When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.
Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.
I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life - that is to say, over 35 - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.
The word 'belief' is a difficult thing for me. I don't believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it - I don't need to believe it.
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.
A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.
A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.
In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.
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.
Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.
The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.
The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.
All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.
The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything more.
Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own.
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.
Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. Why should I henceforth not love my dreams and not make their riddling images into objects of my daily consideration?
A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.
The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.
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.
We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learnt to bear its ills without being overcome by them.
Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.
The Christ-symbol is of the greatest importance for psychology in so far as it is perhaps the most highly developed and differentiated symbol of the self, apart from the figure of the Buddha.
Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.
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.
If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.
There is no birth of consciousness without pain.
Man's task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.
There is no coming to consciousness without pain.
The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.
Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.
For a young person, it is almost a sin, or at least a danger, to be too preoccupied with himself; but for the ageing person, it is a duty and a necessity to devote serious attention to himself.
Understanding does not cure evil, but it is a definite help, inasmuch as one can cope with a comprehensible darkness.
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
A 'scream' is always just that - a noise and not music.
Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?