I cannot love anyone if I hate myself. That is the reason why we feel so extremely uncomfortable in the presence of people who are noted for their special virtuousness, for they radiate an atmosphere of the torture they inflict on themselves. That is not a virtue but a vice.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Virtue, Virtues
Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Vision, Being True to Yourself
Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Individuality
Our blight is ideologies—they are the long-expected Antichrist!
—Carl Gustav Jung
The teacher pretended that algebra was a perfectly natural affair, to be taken for granted, whereas I didn’t even know what numbers were. Mathematics classes became sheer terror and torture to me. I was so intimidated by my incomprehension that I did not dare to ask any questions.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Mathematics
Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Mistakes
The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.
—Carl Gustav Jung
The source of numerous psychic disturbances and difficulties occasioned by man’s progressive alienation from his instinctual foundation, i.e., by his uprootedness and identification with his conscious knowledge of himself, by his concern with consciousness at the expense of the unconscious. The result is that modern man can know himself only in so far as he can become conscious of himself—his consciousness therefor orients itself chiefly by observing and investigating the world around him, and it is to its peculiarities that he must adapt his psychic and technical resources. This task is so exacting, and its fulfillment so advantageous, that he forgets himself in the process, losing sight of his instinctual nature and putting his own conception of himself in place of his real being. In this way he slips imperceptibly into a purely conceptual world where the products of his conscious activity progressively replace reality. Separation from his instinctual nature inevitably plunges civilized man into the conflict between conscious and unconscious, spirit and nature, knowledge and faith, a split that becomes pathological the moment his consciousness is no longer able to neglect or suppress his instinctual side.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Insanity
Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Alcohol
All the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insolvable. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Problem-solving, Acceptance, Realistic Expectations, Problems
It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how things are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Meaning, Miscellaneous, Perspective
I had always worked with the temperamental conviction that at bottom there are no insoluble problems, and experience justified me in so far as I have often seen patients simply outgrow a problem that had destroyed others. This ‘outgrowing,’ as I formerly called it, proved on further investigation to be a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest appeared on the patient’s horizon, and through this broadening of his outlook the insoluble problem lost its urgency.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Problems
The achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of diminution of personality
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Achievement, Success & Failure
Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands. It is part and parcel of our knowledge and obscures our insight only when it holds that the understanding given by it is the only kind there is.
—Carl Gustav 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.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Change
Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Adventure
All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Imagination
If I accept the fact that a god is absolute and beyond all human experiences, he leaves me cold. I do not affect him, nor does he affect me. But if I know that a god is a powerful impulse in my soul, at once I must concern myself with him, for then he can become important
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Faith
We think of our efficient teachers with a sense of recognition, but those who touched our humanity we remember with gratitude. Learning is the essential mineral, but warmth is the life-element for the child’s soul, no less than for the growing plant.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Teaching
When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Fate
In the second half of life the necessity is imposed of recognizing no longer the validity of our former ideals but of their contraries. Of perceiving the error in what was previously our conviction, of sensing the untruth in what was our truth, and of weighing the degree of opposition, and even of hostility, in what we took to be love.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Age
No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps. A nation has no honor, it has no word to keep
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Government
We can keep from a child all knowledge of earlier myths, but we cannot take from him the need for mythology
—Carl Gustav Jung
Where love rules, there is no will to power; where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
—Carl Gustav Jung
The word “happiness” would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Balance, Sadness, Joy
It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Wickedness, Evil
It is on the whole probably that we continually dream, but that consciousness makes such a noise that we do not hear it.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Dreams
Not to be able to grow old is just as ridiculous as to be unable to outgrow childhood.
—Carl Gustav Jung
The cinema, like the detective story, enables us to experience without danger to ourselves all the excitements, passions, and fantasies which have to be repressed in a humanistic age.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Art
If there is anything we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Change
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau French Philosopher
- Henri Frederic Amiel Swiss Philosopher, Writer
- Karl Barth Swiss Protestant Theologian
- Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi Swiss Educator
- Abraham Maslow American Psychologist
- Carl Rogers American Psychologist
- Hermann Hesse Swiss Novelist, Poet
- Alfred Adler Austrian Psychiatrist
- Albert Einstein German-born Theoretical Physicist
- Erich Fromm German Social Philosopher
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