Jung Quotes

“Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow.

Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations.

The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight.

The camera obscura.

Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“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

“I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life - that is to say, over 35 - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook.”
― Carl Gustav Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

“Though no one notices at the time, in-loveness obliterates the humanity of the beloved. One does a curious kind of insult to another by falling in love with him, for we are really looking at our own projection of God, not at the other person. If two people are in love, they tread on star dust for a time and live happily ever after—that is so long as this experience of divinity has obliterated time for them. Only when they come down to earth do they have to look at each other realistically and only then does the possibility of mature love exist. If one person is in love and the other not, the cooler one is likely to say, "We would have something better between us if you would look at me rather than at your image of me.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche

“Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon, an accompanying guide who remembers your calling.

The daimon motivates. It protects. It invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life - and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns.

It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition, particularly by the person who is its caretaker. Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind, making possible communication between all people and all things by means of metaphors”
― James Hillman

“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

“As soon as we notice that certain types of event "like" to cluster together at certain times, we begin to understand the attitude of the Chinese, whose theories of medicine, philosophy, and even building are based on a "science" of meaningful coincidences. The classical Chinese texts did not ask what causes what, but rather what "likes" to occur with what.”
― M.-L. von Franz

“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

“...rather than ask why something happened (i.e. what caused it), Jung asked: What did it happen for? This same tendency appears in physics: Many modern physicists are now looking more for "connections" in nature than for causal laws (determinism).”
― M.-L. von Franz

“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

“...in microphysics the observer interferes with the experiment in a way that can't be measured and that therefore can't be eliminated. No natural laws can be formulated, saying "such-and-such will happen in every case." All the microphysicist can say is "such-and-such is, according to statistical probability, likely to happen." This naturally represents a tremendous problem for our classical physical thinking. It requires a consideration, in a scientific experiment, of the mental outlook of the participant-observer: It could this be said that scientists can no longer hope to describe any aspects or qualities of outer objects in a completely independent, "objective" manner.”
― M.-L. von Franz

“A square space with complicated ceremonies going on in it, the purpose of which is to transform animals into men. Two snakes, moving in opposite directions, have to be got rid of at once. Some animals are there, e.g. foxes and dogs. The people walk around the square and must let themselves be bitten by these animals in each of the four corners . If they run away all is lost. Now the higher animals come on to the scene-bulls and ibexes. Four snakes glide into the four corners. Then the congregation flies out. Two sacrificial priests carry in a huge reptile and with this they touch the forehead of a shapeless animal lump or life-mass. Out of it there instantly rises a human head, transfigured. A voice proclaims: "These are attempts at being.”
― David Lindorff, Pauli and Jung: The Meeting of Two Great Minds

“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

“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

“[...] they eventually sicken from the abuse of their own power. There are no monsters left in heaven or on earth for them to overcome, and their consequent wild behavior brings retribution in its train.”
― Joseph L. Henderson

“One sometimes feels that the unconscious is leading the way in accordance with a secret design. It is as if something is looking at me, something that I do not see but that sees me [...].”
― M.-L. von Franz

“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

“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

“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