Carl Jung Quotes

We are always human and we should never forget the burden of being only human

"To cherish secrets and to restrain emotions are psychic misdemeanours for which nature finally visits us with sickness — that is, when we do these things in private. But when they are done in communion with others they satisfy nature and may even count as useful virtues. It is only restraint practised in and for oneself that is unwholesome. It is as if man had an inalienable right to behold all that is dark, imperfect, stupid and guilty in his fellow-beings — for such of course are the things that we keep private to protect ourselves. It seems to be a sin in the eyes of nature to hide our insufficiency — just as much as to live entirely on our inferior side. There appears to be a conscience in mankind which severely punishes the man who does not somehow and at some time, at whatever cost to his pride, cease to defend and assert himself, and instead confess himself fallible and human. Until he can do this, an impenetrable wall shuts him out from the living experience of feeling himself a man among men. Here we find a key to the great significance of true, unstereotyped confession — a significance known in all the initiation and mystery cults of the ancient world, as is shown by a saying from the Greek mysteries: "Give up what thou hast, and then thou wilt receive.

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

Even the most carefully defined philosophical or mathematical concept, which we are sure does not contain more than we have put into it, is nevertheless more than we assume. It is a psychic event and as such partly unknowable. The very numbers you use in counting are more than you take them to be. They are at the same time mythological elements (for the Pythagoreans, they were even divine); but you are certainly unaware of this when you use numbers for a practical purpose.

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. He is already on the way; he is like Mohammad. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with wild god. That can be the historic future.

Without this playing with fantasy, no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

The more critical reason dominates, the more impoverished life becomes. When reason is overvalued, the individual suffers a loss. Relying more on facts and rationality than on imagination and theory detracts from the quality of a person's intellectual life.

The idea of an all-powerful divine Being is present everywhere, unconsciously if not consciously, because it is an archetype. There is in the psyche some superior power, and if it is not consciously a god, it is the "belly" at least, in St. Paul's words. I therefore consider it wiser to acknowledge the idea of God consciously, for, if we do not, something else is made God, usually something quite inappropiate and stupid such as only an "enlightened" intellect could hatch forth.

Anything can be settled by an intellect that is not subject to the control of feeling — and yet the intellectual still suffers from a neurosis if feeling is undeveloped.

The man who looks only outside and quails before the big battalions has no resource with which to combat the evidence of his senses and his reason.

The girl dreams she is dangerously ill. Suddenly birds come out of her skin and cover her completely ... Swarms of gnats obscure the sun, the moon, and all the stars except one. That one start falls upon the dreamer.

Wo die Liebe herrscht, da gibt es keinen machtwillen, und wo die macht den vorrang hat, da fehlt die Liebe. Das eine ist der Schatten des andern.

Where your fear is,
there is your task.

Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries.