Explore Quotes by Carl Jung

As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single individual who will experience it and carry it through. The change must indeed begin with an individual; it might be any one of us. Nobody can afford to look round and to wait for somebody else to do what he is loath to do himself.

To confront a person with their own shadow is to show them their own light.

What did you do as a child that made that hours pass like minutes? [Herein lies the key to your earthy pursuits.]

The primary cause of unhappiness in the world today is... lack of faith.

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness.

Consciousness succumbs all too easily to unconscious influences, and these are often truer and wiser than our conscious thinking.

In studying the history of the human mind one is impressed again and again by the fact that its growth keeps pace with a widening range of consciousness, and that each step forward is an extremely painful and laborious achievement. One could almost say that nothing is more hateful to man than to give up the smallest particle of unconsciousness. He has a profound fear of the unknown. Ask anybody who has ever tried to introduce new ideas!

The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life.

The right way to wholeness is made up of fateful detours and wrong turnings.

The woman is increasingly aware that love alone can give her full stature, just as the man begins to discern that spirit alone can endow his life with its highest meaning. Fundamentally, therefore, both seek a psychic relation to the other, because love needs the spirit, and the spirit love, for their fulfillment.

It is a bewildering thing in human life that the things that cause the greatest fear is the source of the greatest wisdom.

From the living fountain of instinct flows everything that is creative; hence the unconscious is not merely conditioned by history, but is the very source of the creative impulse. It is like nature herself - prodigiously conservative, and yet transcending her own historical conditions in her acts of creation.

The seat of faith, however, is not consciousness but spontaneous religious experience, which brings the individual's faith into immediate relation with God.

Without playing with fantasy, no creative work has yet come into being.

The angel personifies something new arising from the deep unconscious.

The angels are a strange genus: they are precisely what they are and cannot be anything else. They are in themselves soulless beings who represent nothing but the thoughts and intuitions of their Lord.

The greater the contrast, the greater the potential. Great energy only comes from a correspondingly great tension of opposites.

You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible to influence.

The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows it to realize its supreme purpose through him.

A collection of a hundred great brains makes one big fathead.

Six weeks after his death my father appeared to me in a dream... It was an unforgettable experience, and it forced me for the first time to think about life after death.