Carl Jung quotes

On action

“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.”

“The healthy man does not torture others—generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.”

“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.)”

“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.”

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

On reflection

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

On mind

“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.”

“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 growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and ... each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement.”

On presence

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

On authenticity

“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”

“The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive.”

On contentment

“Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.”

On faith

“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.”

On death

“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.”

On wholeness

“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.”

On wisdom

“If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.”

On solitude

“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.”

On purpose

“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.”

On truth

“The meaning and design of a problem seem not to lie in its solution, but in our working at it incessantly.”