Top 837 Quotes & Sayings by Carl Jung - Page 3

To be normal is the ultimate aim of the unsuccessful.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Shame is a soul eating emotion.

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.

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.

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

We cannot change anything unless we accept it.

We discover ourselves through others.

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.

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 most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.

Every psychic advance of man arises from the suffering of the soul.

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.

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

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

You are a slave of what you need in your soul.

If God wishes to be born as man and to unite mankind in the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, He suffers the terrible torment of having to bear the world in its reality. It is a crux; indeed, He Himself is His own cross. The world is God's suffering, and every individual human being who wishes even to approach his own wholeness knows very well that this means bearing his own cross. But the eternal promise for him who bears his own cross is the Paraclete.

What you resist persist.

Modern man is sick because he is not whole.

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

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

The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents.

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

Invited or not, God is present.

Conflict exists strictly as an opportunity to raise our consciousness.

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.

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

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

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.

For better to come, good must stand aside.

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

Please remember, it is what you are that heals, not what you know.

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.

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.

The unconscious psyche believes in life after death

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

Twelve experts gathered in one room equal one big idiot.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force

When you succeed in awakening the Kundalini, so that it starts to move out of its mere potentiality, you necessarily start a world which is totally different from our world. It is the world of eternity.

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

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.

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

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.