Carl Jung Quotes

From the beginning, I had a sense of destiny, as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. This gave me an inner security, and, though I could never prove to myself, it proved itself to me. I did not have the certainty, it had me.

"Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable-perhaps everything."-Memories, Dreams, Reflections

My speech is imperfect. Not because I want to shine with words, but out of the impossibility of finding those words, I speak in images. With nothing else to express the words from the depths.

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.

I feel it is the duty of one who goes his own way to inform society of what he finds on his voyage of discovery.

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

The more one sees of human fate and the more one examines its secret springs of action, the more one is impressed by the strength of unconscious motives and by the limitations of free choice

The achievement of psychological maturity is an individual task-and so is increasingly difficult today when man's individuality is threatened by widespread conformity.

Because we cannot discover God's throne in the sky with a radiotelescope or establish (for certain) that a beloved father or mother is still about in a more or less corporeal form, people assume that such ideas are "not true." I would rather say that they are not "true" enough, for these are conceptions of a kind that have accompanied human life from prehistoric times, and that still break through into consciousness at any provocation.

A true symbol appears only when there is a need to express what thought cannot think or what is only divined or felt.

Eros is a superhuman power which, like nature herself, allows itself to be conquered and exploited as though it were impotent. But triumph over nature is dearly paid for. Nature requires no explanations of principle, but asks only for tolerance and wise measure. "Eros is a mighty daemon," as the wise Diotima said to Socrates. We shall never get the better of him, or only to our own hurt. He is not the whole of our inward nature, though he is at least one of its essential aspects.

A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.

Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and
denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and
isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.