Quotes from Carl Jung

What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.

Unfortunately there is no doubt about the fact that man is, as a 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.

Historically, it is chiefly in times of physical, political, economic and spiritual distress that men's eyes turn with anxious hope to the future, and when anticipations, utopias and apocalyptic visions multiply.

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.

We don't so much solve our problems as we outgrow them.

The perpetual hesitation of the neurotic to launch out into life is readily explained by his desire to stand aside so as not to get involved in the dangerous struggle for existence. But anyone who refuses to experience life must stifle his desire to live – in other words, he must commit partial suicide.

He would have lived countless times over the life of the individual, of the family, tribe and people, and he would possess the living sense of the rhythm of growth, flowering and decay.

There are so many indications that one does not know what one sees. Is it the trees or is it the woods?

Those who look outside, dream; those who look inside, awaken.

Prophets are always disagreeable and usually have bad manners, but it is said that they occasionally hit the nail on the head . . . like every true prophet, the artist is the unwitting mouthpiece of the psychic secrets of his time and is often as unconscious as a sleep-walker.

Archetypal images decide the fate of man.

The psyche's attachment to the brain, i.e., its space-time limitation, is no longer as self-evident and incontrovertible as we have hitherto been led to believe. … It is not only permissible to doubt the absolute validity of space-time perception; it is, in view of the available facts, even imperative to do so.

Let things happen.

We cannot slay our incapacity and rise above it, but that is precisely what we wanted. Incapacity exists. No one should deny it, find fault with it or shout it down.

Non foras ire, in interiore homine habitat veritas' (Go not outside; truth dwells in the inner man).

If I can demonstrate to a madman that his ideas do not lie beyond the sphere of the human mind, he will still feel part of human society, and there is still hope. As long as you can make yourself understood to one single person, you are not yet mad. And even if you find no such person, you should consult some old books, and perhaps there you will find something that seems familiar to you. Only when you can no longer make yourself understood will you be mad and excluded.

neurosis is…a defence…or an attempt, somewhat dearly paid for, to escape from the inner voice and hence from the vocation…Behind the neurotic perversion is concealed his vocation, his destiny: the growth of personality, the full realization of the life-will that is born with the individual. It is the man without amor fati [love of fate] who is the neurotic; he, truly, has missed his vocation.

Synchronicity could be understood as an ordering system by means of which "similar" things coincide, without there being any apparent cause.

A child certainly allows himself to be impressed by the grand talk of his parents," wrote Jung "but do they really imagine he is educated by it? Actually it is the parents' lives that educate the child – what they add by word at best serves only to confuse him.

You are a slave of what you need in your soul.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes

By not being aware of having a shadow, you declare a part of your personality to be non-existent. Then it enters the kingdom of the non-existent, which swells up and takes on enormous proportions…If you get rid of qualities you don't like by denying them, you become more and more unaware of what you are, you declare yourself more and more non-existent, and your devils will grow fatter and fatter.

It is with you all the time and demands fulfillment. If you pretend to be blind and dumb to this demand, you feign being blind and deaf to yourself This way you will never reach the knowledge of the heart. The knowledge ofyour heart is how your heart is. From a cunning heart you will know cunning. From a good heart you will know goodness. So that your understanding becomes perfect, consider that your heart is both good and evil. You ask, "What? Should I also live evil?

one form of life cannot simply be abandon unless it is exchanged for another