Carl Jung Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

To be normal is the ultimate aim of the unsuccessful.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

VOCATUS ATQUE NON VOCATUS DEUS ADERIT.

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

The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

God enters through the wound.

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

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

Conflict exists strictly as an opportunity to raise our consciousness.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

At the moment I am looking into astrology, which seems indispensable for a proper understanding of mythology. There are strange and wondrous things in these lands of darkness. Please, don't worry about my wanderings in these infinitudes. I shall return laden with rich booty for our knowledge of the human psyche.

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.

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.