Carl Jung Quotes

I am an orphan, alone: nevertheless I am found everywhere. I am one, but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons.

When you are up against a wall, put down roots like a tree, until clarity comes from deeper sources to see over that wall and grow.

That higher and "complete" man is begotten by the "unknown" father and born from Wisdom, and it is he who, in the figure of the puer aeternus—"vultu mutabilis albus et ater"—represents our totality, which transcends consciousness. It was this boy into whom Faust had to change, abandoning his inflated onesidedness which saw the devil only outside. Christ's "Except ye become as little children" is a prefiguration of this, for in them the opposites lie close together; but what is meant is the boy who is born from the maturity of the adult man, and not the unconscious child we would like to remain.

There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion

Our heart glows, and secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. Dealing with the unconscious has become a question of life for us.

I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole.

Is it worth the lion's while to terrify the mouse?

They do not realize that a myth is dead if it no longer lives and grows. Our myth has become mute, and gives no answers.

Among the so-called neurotics of our day there are a good many
who in other ages would not have been neurotic-that is, divided
against themselves. If they had lived in a period and in a milieu in
which man was still linked by myth with the world of the ancestors,
and thus with nature truly experienced and not merely seen from
outside, they would have been spared this division with themselves.
I am speaking of those who cannot tolerate the loss of myth and
who can neither find a way to a merely exterior world, to the world
as seen by science, nor rest satisfied with an intellectual juggling
with words, which has nothing whatsoever to do with wisdom.

Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naively suppose that people are as we imagine them to be.

What can a man say about woman, his own opposite? I mean of course something sensible, that is outside the sexual program, free of resentment, illusion, and theory. Where is the man to be found capable of such superiority? Woman always stands just where the man's shadow falls, so that he is only too liable to confuse the two. Then, when he tries to repair this misunderstanding, he overvalues her and believes her the most desirable thing in the world.

The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.

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.)

For we are all in some way or other kept asunder by our secrets; and instead of seeking through confession to bridge the abysses that separate us from one another, we choose the easy by-way of deceptive opinions and illusions.

Aging people should know that their lives are not mounting and unfolding but that an inexorable inner process forces the contraction of life. For a young person it is almost a sin — and certainly a danger — to be too much occupied with himself; but for the aging person it is a duty and a necessity to give serious attention to himself.