Carl Jung Quotes

“Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life...If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature...Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.”
― C.G. Jung, The Red Book: A Reader's Edition

“Nobody can fall so low unless he has a great depth.

If such a thing can happen to a man, it challenges his best and highest on the other side; that is to say, this depth corresponds to a potential height, and the blackest darkness to a hidden light.”
― C.G. Jung

“‎"...the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”
― Carl Jung

“While we hear Carl Jung's jazzy humming and Nietzsche's dance steps intermittently during our musings, we can willingly tear down the spread of depression from all the gray zones around and allow the sun to shine and warm up the hearts' expectations. ("A handful of dust")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“We should know what our convictions are, and stand for them. Upon one's own philosophy, conscious or unconscious, depends one's ultimate interpretation of facts. Therefore it is wise to be as clear as possible about one's subjective principles. As the man is, so will be his ultimate truth.”
― C.G. Jung

“Every human life contains a potential. It that potential is not fulfilled, that life was wasted.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“I myself found a fascinating example of this in Nietzsche’s book Thus Spake Zarathustra, where the author reproduces almost word for word an incident reported in a ship’s log for the year 1686. By sheer chance I had read this seaman’s yarn in a book published about 1835 (half a century before Nietzsche wrote); and when I found the similar passage in Thus Spake Zarathustra, I was struck by its peculiar style, which was different from Nietzsche’s usual language. I was convinced that Nietzsche must also have seen the old book, though he made no reference to it. I wrote to his sister, who was still alive, and she confirmed that she and her brother had in fact read the book together when he was 11 years old. I think, from the context, it is inconceivable that Nietzsche had any idea that he was plagiarizing this story. I believe that fifty years later it has unexpectedly slipped into focus in his conscious mind.”
― C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols

“Carl Jung never said: “There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
What Dr. Jung said in two separate and unrelated statements was:
Seldom, or perhaps never, does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain. ~Carl Jung, Contributions to Analytical Psychology, P. 193
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 99.”
― C.G. Jung

“The purpose of Alchemy is to liberate the whole individual which is hidden in the darkness, threatened by the rational and correct conduct of life, consequently experiencing themselves as hindered and on the wrong path.”
― Carl Jung

“If you fulfil the pattern that is peculiar to yourself, you have loved yourself, you have accumulated and have abundance; you bestow virtue then because you have luster. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 502”
― Carl Jung

“Man is the only creature with the power to control instinct by his own will, but he is also able to suppress, distort, and wound it… Supressed instincts can gain control of man; they can even destroy him.”
― Carl Jung

“To Jung, the unconscious contains important wisdom to be learned. A life lived in deep communication with the unconscious is far more influential and personally satisfying.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“I felt as if my own personality was changing shades or even as if I had no personality. I was a blank canvas and I let people paint their own shadows onto me freely. With what was left of my intuition I must have grasped the symbolism of it. This must be the explanation why when we were all asked by our literature teacher 'What animal do you indetify with?' I answered 'chameleon'.”
― R.P. Heaven, Awakening Ignited

“The Hiding - A Haiku

In shadows he dwells,
Thinking is tough, he judges,
Light reveals the truth.”
― Amogh Swamy, On My Way To Infinity: A Seeker's Poetic Pilgrimage

“Nevertheless, a love that is so deep, bears deeper wounds. The intangible scars on his heart pained more for he never expressed it. But repressed emotions run around as man’s unconscious decides, and since it was not being given its due, it heaved him into a deep well. Outside, it manifested as an abnormally reticent personality.

- Unlettered”
― Ajanta Sengupta

“Nevertheless, a love that is so deep, bears deeper wounds. The intangible scars on his heart pained more for he never expressed it. But repressed emotions run around as man’s unconscious decides, and since it was not being given its due, it heaved him into a deep well. Outside, it manifested as an abnormally reticent personality.”
― Ajanta Sengupta, Unlettered

“The Arab shows them greater respect than we. He writes on every letter lnsha-allah, "If it please God," for only then will the letter arrive. In spite of our reluctance to admit chance, and in spite of the fact that events run true to general laws, it is undeniable that we are always and everywhere exposed to incalculable accidents. And what is more invisible and arbitrary than chance? What is more unavoidable and more annoying?
- Carl Jung”
― Ajanta Sengupta, Unlettered

“In spite of our proud domination of nature, we are still her victims, for we have not even learned to control our own nature.”
― Carl Jung

“Our present lives are dominated by the goddess Reason, who is our greatest and most tragic illusion.”
― Carl Jung

“As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single individual who will experience it and carry it through. The change must indeed begin with an individual; it might be any one of us.”
― Carl Jung

“The Buddhist discards the world of unconscious fantasies as useless illusions; the Christian puts his Church and his Bible between himself and his unconscious; and the rational intellectual does not yet know that his consciousness is not his total psyche.”
― Carl Jung

“I have spent more than half a century in investigating natural symbols, and I have come to the conclusion that dream and their symbols are not stupid and meaningless. On the contrary, dreams provide the most interesting information for those who take the trouble to understand their symbols. The result, it is true, have little to do with such worldly concerns as buying and selling. But the meaning of life is not exhaustively explained by one's business life, nor is the deep desire of the human heart answered by a bank account.”
― Carl Jung

“We have obviously been so busy with the question of what we think that we entirely forgot to ask what the unconscious psyche thinks about us.”
― Carl Jung

“The hero, on the contrary, must realize that the shadow exists and that he can draw strength from it.”
― Joseph L. Henderson

“One sometimes feels that the unconscious is leading the way in accordance with a secret design. It is as if something is looking at me, something that I do not see but that sees me [...].”
― M.-L. von Franz

“Many existential philosophers try to describe this state, but they go only as far as stripping off the illusions of consciousness: They go right up to the door of the unconscious and the fail to open it.”
― M.-L. von Franz

“He saw that simply to fulfill one's destiny is the greatest human achievement, and that our utilitarian notions have to give way in the face of the demands of our unconscious psyche.”
― M.-L. von Franz, Man and His Symbols

“There is only one thing that seems to work; and that is to turn directly toward the approaching darkness without prejudice and totally naively, and to try to find out what its secret aim is and what it wants from you.”
― M.-L. von Franz, Man and His Symbols

“When a man is alone, for instance, he feels relatively all right; but as soon as 'the others' do dark, primitive things, he begins to fear that if he doesn't join in, he will be considered a fool.”
― M.-L. von Franz, Man and His Symbols