Jung, Carl quotes
1875-1961 Swiss PsychiatristThere can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.
Jung, Carl
Emotions
Caution has its place, no doubt, but we cannot refuse our support to a serious venture which challenges the whole of the personality. If we oppose it, we are trying to suppress what is best in man --his daring and his aspirations. And should we succeed, we should only have stood in the way of that invaluable experience which might have given a meaning to life. What would have happened if Paul had allowed himself to be talked out of his journey to Damascus?
Jung, Carl
Caution
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances. If there is any reaction, both are transformed.
Jung, Carl
Cooperation
It is on the whole probably that we continually dream, but that consciousness makes such a noise that we do not hear it.
Jung, Carl
Dreams
In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.
Jung, Carl
Chaos
The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life.
Jung, Carl
Cinema
A collection of a hundred Great brains makes one big fathead.
Jung, Carl
Committees and Meetings
Creative powers can just as easily turn out to be destructive. It rests solely with the moral personality whether they apply themselves to good things or to bad. And if this is lacking, no teacher can supply it or take its place.
Jung, Carl
Creativity
The heaping together of paintings by Old Masters in museums is a catastrophe; likewise, a collection of a hundred Great Brains makes one big fathead.
Jung, Carl
Committees and Meetings
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.
Jung, Carl
Egotism
Where love rules, there is no will to power; where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
Jung, Carl
Love
There is no coming to consciousness without pain.
Jung, Carl
Pain
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.
Jung, Carl
Mistakes
The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.
Jung, Carl
Individuality
Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.
Jung, Carl
Individuality
Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better.
Jung, Carl
Genius
When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.
Jung, Carl
Fate
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.
Jung, Carl
Happiness
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
Jung, Carl
Light
Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.
Jung, Carl
Masses
The wise man who is not heeded is counted a fool, and the fool who proclaims the general folly first and loudest passes for a prophet and Führer, and sometimes it is luckily the other way round as well, or else mankind would long since have perished of stupidity.
Jung, Carl
Leaders and Leadership
Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.
Jung, Carl
Influence
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Jung, Carl
Imitation
A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.
Jung, Carl
Passion
Our blight is ideologies -- they are the long-expected Antichrist!
Jung, Carl
Ideology
Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.
Jung, Carl
Knowledge
All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.
Jung, Carl
Imagination
Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.
Jung, Carl
Imagination
Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
Jung, Carl
Sanity
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.
Jung, Carl
Promises
The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor naked heathen, but the spiritual heathen who populate Europe have as yet heard nothing of Christianity.
Jung, Carl
Missionaries
Nothing is more repulsive than a furtively prurient spirituality; it is just as unsavory as gross sensuality.
Jung, Carl
Spirit and Spirituality
It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.
Jung, Carl
Perspective
The healthy man does not torture others -- generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.
Jung, Carl
Torture
Psychoanalysis cannot be considered a method of education if by education we mean the topiary art of clipping a tree into a beautiful artificial shape. But those who have a higher conception of education will prize most the method of cultivating a tree so that it fulfils to perfection its own natural conditions of growth.
Jung, Carl
Psychoanalysis
Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.
Jung, Carl
Mind
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.
Jung, Carl
Pride
Good. There are many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year s course. 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.
Jung, Carl
Sadness
If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.
Jung, Carl
Understanding
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.
Jung, Carl
Teachers and Teaching
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.
Jung, Carl
Self-knowledge
We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learnt to bear its ills without being overcome by them.
Jung, Carl
Adversity
The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life.
Jung, Carl
Consciousness
Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.
Jung, Carl
Adventure
The achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of diminution of personality
Jung, Carl
Achievement
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.
Jung, Carl
Conflict
Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.
Jung, Carl
Addiction
From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.
Jung, Carl
Age and Aging
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.
Jung, Carl
Belief
The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid.
Jung, Carl
Youth
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.
Jung, Carl
Wickedness
I cannot love anyone if I hate myself. That is the reason why we feel so extremely uncomfortable in the presence of people who are noted for their special virtuousness, for they radiate an atmosphere of the torture they inflict on themselves. That is not a virtue but a vice.
Jung, Carl
Virtue
Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.
Jung, Carl
Vision