Explore Quotes by Carl Jung

The artist's life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him [or her]-on the one hand, the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life, and on the other a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire ... There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire.

Every victory contains the germ of future defeat.

So far as the personality is still potential, it can be called transcendent, and so far as it is unconscious, it is indistinguishable from all those things that carry its projections...that is, symbols of the outside world and the cosmic symbols. These form the psychological basis for the conception of man as a macrocosm through the astrological components of his character.

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.

Astrology is one of the intuitive methods like the I Ching, geomantics, and other divinatory procedures. It is based upon the synchronicity principle, meaningful coincidence. ... Astrology is a naively projected psychology in which the different attitudes and temperaments of man are represented as gods and identified with planets and zodiacal constellations.

Astrology is of particular interest to the psychologist, since it contains a sort of psychological experience which we call projected - this means that we find the psychological facts as it were in the constellations. This originally gave rise to the idea that these factors derive from the stars, whereas they are merely in a relation of synchronicity with them. I admit that this is a very curious fact which throws a peculiar light on the structure of the human mind.

My evenings are taken up very largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth.

Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands.

Error is just as important a condition of life's progress as truth

Where love stops, power begins, and violence, and terror

The dream arises from a part of the mind unknown to us, but none the less important, and is concerned with the desires for the approaching day.

The only thing that really matters now is whether man can climb up to a higher moral level, to a higher plane of consciousness, in order to be equal to the superhuman powers which the fallen angels have played into his hands. But he can make no progress until he becomes very much better acquainted with his own nature.

As one grows older one must try not to work oneself to death unnecessarily. At least that's how it is with me... I can scarcely keep pace and must watch out that the creative forces do not chase me around the universe in a wallop.

The greatest potential for growth and self-realisation exists in the second half of life.

The longing for light is the longing for consciousness.

Whether you call the principle of existence "God," "matter," "energy," or anything else you like, you have created nothing; you have merely changed a symbol. Eastern and Western Thinking, 1938

I can still recall vividly how Freud said to me, "My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark" ... In some astonishment I asked him, "A bulwark-against what?" To which he replied, "Against the black tide of mud"-and here he hesitated for a moment, then added of occultism.

Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The "newness" in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components.

The problem of synchronicity has puzzled me for a long time, ever since the middle twenties, when I was investigating the phenomena of the collective unconscious and kept on coming across connections which I simply could not explain as chance groupings or "runs." What I found were "coincidences" which were connected so meaningfully that their "chance" concurrence would represent a degree of improbability that would have to be expressed by an astronomical figure.

Learn your techniques well and be prepared to let them go when you touch the human soul.

Whenever you hear anyone talking about a cultural or even about a human problem, you should never forget to inquire who the speaker really is. The more general the problem, the more the person will smuggle his or her own personal psychology into the account he or she gives of it.