Jung Quotes

“The fact that a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing ... He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths ... There are not a few who are called awake by the summons of the voice, whereupon they are at once set apart from the others, feeling themselves confronted with a problem about which the others know nothing. In most cases it is impossible to explain to the others what has happened, for any understanding is walled off by impenetrable prejudices. "You are no different from anybody else," they will chorus or, "there's no such thing," and even if there is such a thing, it is immediately branded as "morbid"...He is at once set apart and isolated, as he has resolved to obey the law that commands him from within. "His own law!" everybody will cry. But he knows better: it is the law...The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization — absolute and unconditional— of its own particular law ... To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being ... he has failed to realize his own life's meaning.”
― Carl Jung

“But one must remember that they were all men with systems. Freud, monumentally hipped on sex (for which he personally had little use) and almost ignorant of Nature: Adler, reducing almost everything to the will to power: and Jung, certainly the most humane and gentlest of them, and possibly the greatest, but nevertheless the descendant of parsons and professors, and himself a super-parson and a super-professor. all men of extraordinary character, and they devised systems that are forever stamped with that character.… Davey, did you ever think that these three men who were so splendid at understanding others had first to understand themselves? It was from their self-knowledge they spoke. They did not go trustingly to some doctor and follow his lead because they were too lazy or too scared to make the inward journey alone. They dared heroically. And it should never be forgotten that they made the inward journey while they were working like galley-slaves at their daily tasks, considering other people's troubles, raising families, living full lives. They were heroes, in a sense that no space-explorer can be a hero, because they went into the unknown absolutely alone. Was their heroism simply meant to raise a whole new crop of invalids? Why don't you go home and shoulder your yoke, and be a hero too?”
― Robertson Davies, The Manticore

“The probability of a certain set of circumstances coming together in a meaningful (or tragic) way is so low that it simply cannot be considered mere coincidence. ”
― V.C. King

“Character forms a life regardless of how obscurely that life is lived and how little light falls on it from the stars.”
― James Hillman

“The librarian was explaining the benefits of the Dewey decimal system to her junior--benefits that extended to every area of life. It was orderly, like the universe. It had logic. It was dependable. Using it allowed a kind of moral uplift, as one's own chaos was also brought under control.

'Whenever I am troubled,' said the librarian, 'I think about the Dewey decimal system.'

'Then what happens?' asked the junior, rather overawed.

'Then I understand that trouble is just something that has been filed in the wrong place. That is what Jung was explaining of course--as the chaos of our unconscious contents strive to find their rightful place in the index of consciousness.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“How many of those who are insecure seek power over others as a compensation for inadequacy and wind up bringing consequences down upon their heads and those around them? How many hide out in their lives, resist the summons to show up, or live fugitive lives, jealous, projecting onto others, and then wonder why nothing ever really feels quite right. How many proffer compliance with the other, buying peace at the price of soul, and wind up with neither?”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“If you think along the lines of Nature then you think properly."
from the video "Carl Jung speaks about death”
― C. G. Jung

“The danger of abusing the discovery of the truth value of imagination for retrogressive tendencies is exemplified by the work of Carl Jung. More empathically than Freud, he has insisted on the cognitive force of imagination. According to Jung, phantasy is ‘undistinguishably’ united with all other mental functions, it appears ‘now as primeval, now as the ultimate and most audacious synthesis of all capabilities.’ Phantasy is above all the ‘creative activity out of which flow the answers to all answerable questions’; it is ‘the mother of all possibilities, in which all mental opposites as well as the conflict between internal and external world are united.’ Phantasy has always built the bridge between the irreconcilable demands of object and subject, extroversion and introversion. The simultaneously retrospective and expectant character of imagination is thus clearly stated: it looks not only back to an aboriginal golden past, but also forward to still unrealized but realizable possibilities.”
― Herbert Marcuse

“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.”
― C. G. Jung

“According to Jung, synchronicity is an unpredictable moment of meaningful coincidence”
― Megan McCafferty, Charmed Thirds

“Jung observed that everyone has a pathological secret, something so scary, so shameful perhaps, so humiliating, that one will protect it nearly any cost.”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“This is a story of eternal love, which is born among the ices but which is soon mixed with dreams of death and of a new dawn.

The first heroes were those who surrendered themselves to the holocaust of love.

As they died, they caught a last glimpse of the City of Dawn and felt for the last time the milky lightning of the moon.”
― Miguel Serrano, The Visits of the Queen of Sheba

“This is an archetypal motif: where the pearl is, there is also the dragon, and vice versa. They are never separate. Frequently, just after the first intuitive realization of the Self, the powers of desolation and darkness break in. A terrible slaughtering always takes place at the time of the birth of the hero, as for instance the killing of the innocents at Bethlehem when Christ was born. Some persecuting power starts at once to blot out the inner germ. Outwardly, it is often that the innermost kernel of the human being has an actually irritating effect upon outer surroundings. Realization of the Self when in statu nascendi, when only a hunch, makes a person unadapted and difficult for those around, for it disturbs the unconscious instinctive order. Jung often said that it is as if a flock of sheep resented it bitterly that one sheep wanted to walk by itself.”
― Marie-Louise von Franz, The Feminine in Fairy Tales

“Jung was very conscious of the mysteriousness of the human personality and the difficulty of penetrating the outward appearance and discovering the real individual.”
― Christopher Bryant, Jung and the Christian way

“There is only one thing that seems to work; and that is to turn directly toward the approaching darkness without prejudice and totally naively, and to try to find out what its secret aim is and what it wants from you.”
― M.-L. von Franz, Man and His Symbols

“The task of consciousness is to preserve the best possible relationship between the rational and irrational, the concrete and abstract, the literal and symbolic, and so on.”
― Vladislav Šolc, Dark Religion: Fundamentalism from The Perspective of Jungian Psychology

“When the ego is inflated by the Archetype of the Self, some functions of the ego are connected to the reality principle and other sectors harbor grandiose persuasions based on archetypal imagery (Imago Dei) and emotion. Typical with this type of inflation, one feels with great excess, indestructible (protected by God), absolutely justified (having God's mandate) in his or her action, and free from psychological shadow (being supremely good). We termed this type of inflation theocalypsis and will talk more about this concept later in this book.”
― Vladislav Šolc, Dark Religion: Fundamentalism from The Perspective of Jungian Psychology

“Many existential philosophers try to describe this state, but they go only as far as stripping off the illusions of consciousness: They go right up to the door of the unconscious and the fail to open it.”
― M.-L. von Franz

“He saw that simply to fulfill one's destiny is the greatest human achievement, and that our utilitarian notions have to give way in the face of the demands of our unconscious psyche.”
― M.-L. von Franz, Man and His Symbols

“When a man is alone, for instance, he feels relatively all right; but as soon as 'the others' do dark, primitive things, he begins to fear that if he doesn't join in, he will be considered a fool.”
― M.-L. von Franz, Man and His Symbols

“The human ego, through its discriminating function, assigns a good or bad valence to experiences. The degree of conscious awareness of the process of assigning a negative or positive valence can shape the ego's later capacity to integrate things into consciousness. Depression, for example, can be personally experienced as very negative, but from the teleological standpoint can be viewed as a positive process or moment in one's individuation. Jung has clearly shown that neurosis can often serve as a means to a higher level of development and individuation that could not happen any other way. By unifying negative and positive elements (experiences) an individual is able to "extract" greater meaning from life.”
― Vladislav Šolc, George J. Didier

“There are many symbols [...] that are not individual, but collective in their nature and origin. These are chiefly religious images. The believer assumes that they are of divine origin -- that they have been revealed to man. The skeptic flatly believes they've been invented. Both are wrong.”
― C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols

“For the sake of mental stability and even physiological health, the unconscious and the conscious must be integrally connected and thus move on parallel lines. If they are split apart or "dissociated," psychological disturbances follows.”
― C.G. Jung

“The general function of dreams is to try restore our psychological balance by producing dream material that re-establishes, in a subtle way, the total psychic equilibrium.”
― C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols

“From the moment of birth, women are schooled in a million subtle ways to be overly impressed with men and masculine ways, and to take our feminine needs and interests less seriously. The covert conditioning of a lifetime does not automatically disappear just because we want it to; it becomes buried in the unconscious where it continues to influence our behavior without our conscious awareness. I think there are three main reasons why women attempt to impress men: to attract a mate, to bolster our self-esteem, or to get and keep some of the power that can be acquired by aligning ourselves with dominant males.”
― Raffa, Jean Benedict

“When our standard is perfection, we never reach our goals.”
― Raffa, Jean Benedict

“Fanaticism rests not on fact but on psychological projection. It is the correlate of doubt, not of certainty. This illusion is particularly apparent in the religious sphere, where every man is convinced that God is as he sees him and not otherwise—a conviction so strong, so invincible, that one would die for it, as many have actually done. For the conviction of the persecutor is just as strong as that of the martyr, and he feels himself compelled either to convince one who holds a different opinion or to eliminate him.”
― Mary Esther Harding, THE 'I' AND THE 'NOT-I': A STUDY IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CONSCIOUSNESS No. 79 [ 1st ]

“By extricating 'reality' from mind, materialism has sent the significance of nature into exile. With the pathetic grin of hubris stamped on our foolish faces, we carefully unwrap the package and then proceed to throw away its contents whileb proudly storing the empty box on the altar of our ontology. What a huge stash of empty boxes have we accumulated! Idols of stupidity they are; public reminders of a state of affairs that would be hilarious if it weren't tragic.

The meaning of it all is unfolding right under our noses, all the time, but we can't see it. We don't pay any attention. We were taught from childhood to avert our gaze, lest we be considered fools. So now we seem to live in some kind of collective trance, lost in a daze the likes of which have probably never before been witnessed in history. We feel the gaping emptiness and meaninglessness of our condition in the depths of our psyches. But, like a desperate man thrashing about in quicksand, our reactions only make things worse: we chase more fictitious goals and accumulate more fictitious stuff, precisely the things that distract us further from watching what is really happening. And, when we finally realize the senselessness of such reactions, we turn to 'gurus' doling out pill-form answers instead of paying attention to life, the only authentic teacher, who is constantly speaking to us. There is no literal shortcut to whatever it is that the metaphor of life is trying to convey. There is no literal truth. The meaning of it all cannot be communicated directly. There are no secret answers spelled out in words in some rare old book. The metaphor is the only way to the answers, if only we have patience and pay attention. Look around: what is life trying to say?”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There is no Death and Fathom Answers to Life, the Universe and Everything

“Carl Jung had come to the same conclusion fifty years before: Among my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over thirty-five—there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a spiritual outlook on life.”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“This allegory, known as Plato’s Cave, is a powerful illustration of a simple truth: what we take to be reality might only be a shadow.”
― Kevin L. Michel, The Council of Gods