Quotes from C. G. Jung

Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.

God has fallen out of containment in religion and into human hearts—God is incarnating. Our whole unconscious is in an uproar from the God Who wants to know and to be known.

To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light. Once one has experienced a few times what it is like to stand judgingly between the opposites, one begins to understand what is meant by the self. Anyone who perceives his shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle.

If you think along the lines of Nature then you think properly." from the video "Carl Jung speaks about death

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

Too much of the animal disfigures the civilized human being, too much culture makes a sick animal.

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.

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.

Anyone who perceives his shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle.

Man wird nicht dadurch erleuchtet, daß man sich Lichtgestalten vorstellt, sondern durch Bewusstmachung der Dunkelheit.

The future of mankind depends very much upon the recognition of the shadow.

The living spirit grows and even outgrows its earlier forms of expression; it freely chooses the human beings who proclaim it and in which it lives. This living spirit is eternally renewed and pursues its goal in manifold and inconceivable ways throughout the history of humankind. Measured against it, the names and forms which men have given it mean very little: They are only the changing leaves and blossoms on the stem of the eternal tree.

Nobody is immune to a nationwide evil unless he is unshakably convinced of the danger of his own character being tainted by the same evil.

The man with the persona is blind to the existence of inner realities, just as the other [man without a persona] is blind to the reality of the world, which for him has merely the value of an amusing or fantastic playground.

The language and the "people" of the unconscious are symbols, and the means of communications dreams. Thus an examination of Man and his Symbols is in effect an examination of man's relation to his own unconscious. And since in Jung's view the unconscious is the great guide, friend, and adviser of the conscious, this book is related in the most direct terms to the study of human beings and their spiritual problems.

An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead.

Assim também os seres tornaram-se para mim lembranças imperecíveis na medida em que seus nomes sempre estiveram inscritos no livro do meu destino: conhecê-los equivalia a um relembrar.

In principle, the positive advantages of knowledge work specifically to the disadvantage of understanding, the judgment resulting in therefrom is likely to be something of a paradox.

Even today Western man finds it hard to see the psychological necessity for a transcendental subject of cognition as the counter-pole of the empirical universe, although the postulate of a world-confronting self, at least as a point of reflection, is a logical necessity.

Paracelsus... beholds the darksome psyche as a star-strewn night sky, whose planets and fixed constellations represent the archetypes in all their luminosity and numinosity. The starry vault of heaven is in truth the open book of cosmic projection, in which are reflected the mythologems, i.e., the archetypes. In this vision astrology and alchemy, the two classical functionaries of the psychology of the collective unconscious, join hands.

...for healing comes only from what leads the patient beyond himself and beyond his entanglement in the ego.

There are cases where psychoanalysis works worse than any other method. But who has ever claimed that psychoanalysis should be used always and everywhere?

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism. We must beware of thinking of good and evil as absolute opposites.