Carl Jung Quotes

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

The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change.

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud. — address to the Society for Psychical Research in England

Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie.

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.

If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.

I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions - not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation or something I do not know.

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

The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.
Carl Jung
Swiss psychologist (1875 - 1961)

Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next.

Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.

Words are animals, alive with a will of their own

When an inner situation is not made conscious it appears outside as fate.

Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.

Every Mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother and every mother extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter.