Switzerland, 1875–1961
Carl Jung
Swiss psychiatrist, founder of analytical psychology. His ideas — archetype, shadow, individuation — describe the lifelong work of becoming whole.
Carl Jung in 31 lines
Every Carl Jung passage in thinkr's library, with the theme each one speaks to.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
“The European invasion of the East was a deed of violence on a great scale, and it has left us the duty — noblesse oblige — of understanding the mind of the East. This is perhaps more necessary than we realize at present.”
“Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.”
“Since the Devil is the adversary of Christ he should occupy a position equivalent to his and be the Son of God as well. Satan would be the first Son of God and Christ the second.”
“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Without, everything seems discordant; only within does it coalesce into unity. Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes.”
“This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.”
“Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.”
“I find that all my thoughts circle around God like the planets around the sun, and are as irresistibly attracted by Him. I would feel it to be the grossest sin if I were to oppose any resistance to this force.”
“The healthy man does not torture others—generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.”
“The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive.”
“We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.”
“We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. (He is already on the way; he is like Mohammed. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with a wild god.)”
“Our blight is ideologies — they are the long-expected Antichrist!”
“We can never legitimately cut loose from our archetypal foundations unless we are prepared to pay the price of a neurosis, any more than we can rid ourselves of our body and its organs without committing suicide.”
“We know as little of a supreme being as of Matter. But there is as little doubt of the existence of a supreme being as of Matter. The world beyond is reality, and experiential fact. We only don't understand it.”
“Metaphysical assertions, however, are statements of the psyche, and are therefore psychological. ... Whenever the Westerner hears the word psychological, it always sounds to him like only psychological.”
“Even if the whole world were to fall to pieces, the unity of the psyche would never be shattered. And the wider and more numerous the fissures on the surface, the more the unity is strengthened in the depths.”
“If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.”
“One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games and it cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive selves.”
“Seldom, or perhaps never, does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain.”
“The growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and ... each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement.”
“That is why I say to any beginner: Learn your theories as well as you can, but put them aside when you touch the miracle of the living soul. Not theories, but your own creative individuality alone must decide.”
“All ordinary expression may be explained causally, but creative expression which is the absolute contrary of ordinary expression, will be forever hidden from human knowledge.”
“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
“For it all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”
“The meaning and design of a problem seem not to lie in its solution, but in our working at it incessantly.”
“No psychic value can disappear without being replaced by another of equivalent intensity.”
“But we must not forget that only a very few people are artists in life; that the art of life is the most distinguished and rarest of all the arts.”
Where Carl Jung lands on a hard choice
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what a position does when it meets a situation where every option costs something.
A group accepts you only when you hide a real part of yourself.
You are noticing that identity lives inside conditions, not outside them. The risk is forgetting where the mask ends.
You are good at something you no longer love.
You are looking for a form where skill and sincerity can meet. The risk is postponing a clean break with elegant compromise.
Someone else's success bothers you more than you want to admit.
You are treating the feeling as information rather than guilt. The danger is becoming fascinated with yourself instead of changing.
Someone you love will not do the thing that would help them.
You are separating presence from control. The danger is calling it acceptance when it is really fatigue.
You have imagined their comeuppance more than once today.
You are treating the daydream as evidence about yourself rather than about them. The cost is analysis that never becomes redress.
You finally have free hours and you waste every one of them.
You are reading the behaviour as a message rather than a failure. The danger is interpreting instead of beginning.
You cannot tell if you are finding yourself or inventing one.
You are trusting that there is a grain to work with. The risk is calling every impulse authentic because it was loud.
Lessons that quote Carl Jung
- Jung's Inner World — Shadow, persona, and the collective unconscious
- Becoming Whole — Projection and individuation
Reading Carl Jung today
Carl Jung wrote in 1875–1961, from Switzerland — a world with different assumptions about authority, death and what a life is for. That distance is useful rather than a problem: it is what lets the ideas cut against assumptions you did not know you were making.
In thinkr, Carl Jung is one of 44 thinkers you can put a real question to, and the answers come back in that thinker's own voice and commitments rather than as a neutral summary. The 31 passages above are what the app draws on.
Working at roughly the same time
- Albert Camus — France/Algeria, 1913–1960
- Arthur Schopenhauer — Germany, 1788–1860
- Bertrand Russell — UK, 1872–1970
- Friedrich Nietzsche — Germany, 1844–1900
- Hannah Arendt — Germany & United States, 1906–1975
- Henry David Thoreau — USA, 1817–1862
Argues the same cases
David Hume, Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Aristotle take positions on the same dilemmas as Carl Jung, which is usually where the disagreements become concrete.