Quotes from Carl Gustav Jung

Error is just as important a condition of life as truth.

Great talents are the most lovely and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off.

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.

If there is anything we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.

This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.

The little world of childhood with its familiar surroundings is a model of the greater world. The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon the child, the more it will tend to feel and see its earlier miniature world again in the bigger world of adult life.

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

All ages before ours believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment in symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, which is to say, as archetypes of the unconscious. No doubt this discovery is hardly credible as yet.

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.

We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything more.

To the psychotherapist an old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as a young man who is unable to embrace it.

The great problems of life—sexuality, of course, among others—are always related to the primordial images of the collective unconscious. These images are really balancing or compensating factors which correspond with the problems life presents in actuality. This is not to be marveled at, since these images are deposits representing the accumulated experience of thousands of years of struggle for adaptation and existence.

There are cases where psychoanalysis works worse than anything else. But who said that psychoanalysis was to be applied always and everywhere.

We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.

The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not—which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams.

Nobody, as long as he moves about among the currents of life, is without trouble.

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart ... Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.

Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Shame is a soul eating emotion.

Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.

There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.