BIGpedia - Carl Jung - Encyclopedia and Dictionary Online

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)

Swiss psychologist and philosopher

Table of contents

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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.
- The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man (1934)

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
- The Psychology of the Unconscious (1943)

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.
- Variant: As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
- Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962)

Even if the whole world were to fall to pieces, the unity of the psyche would never be shattered. And the wider and more numerous the fissures on the surface, the more the unity is strengthened in the depths.
- Civilization in Transition

Hitler belongs in the category of the truly mystic medicine man. His body does not suggest strength. The outstanding characteristic of his physiognomy is its dreamy look. I was especially struck by that when I saw pictures taken of him [Hitler] in the Czechoslovakian crisis; there was in his eyes the look of a seer.
- During an interview with Ernst Hanfstaengl

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. [Therefore, why expect Hitler to keep his word?] Because Hitler is the nation.
- During an interview with Ernst Hanfstaengl

Attributed

Superstition and accident manifest the will of God.

A shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead.

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is "man" in a higher sense— he is "collective man"— one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic forms of mankind.

Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.

Death is psychologically as important as birth... Shrinking away from it is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own.

Great talents are the most lovely and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off.

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.

I could not say I believe— I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God. (When asked if he believed that God exists.)

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance towards oneself can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures.

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.

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

India did not pass me by without a trace: it left tracks which lead me from one infinity to another infinity.

It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.

It was most essential for me to have a normal life in the real world as a counterpoise to that strange inner world. My family and my profession remained the base to which I could return...

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.

Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.

Man's task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.

Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.

Nothing worse could happen to one than to be completely understood.

Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.

Our heart glows, and secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. Dealing with the unconscious has become a question of life for us.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul.

Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.

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.

Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality.

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

Shrinking away from death is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.

Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better.

The achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of diminution of personality.

The attainment of wholeness requires one to stake one’s whole being. Nothing less will do; there can be no easier conditions, no substitutes, no compromises.

The brain is viewed as an appendage of the genital glands. (Comment upon Freudian psychology).

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

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 least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

The man who promises everything is sure to fulfil nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.

The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.

The word "belief" is a difficult thing for me. I don't believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it— I don't need to believe it.

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.

Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.

Understanding does not cure evil, but it is a definite help, inasmuch as one can cope with a comprehensible darkness.

We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything more.

We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.

We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.

We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learnt to bear its ills without being overcome by them.

We need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself...

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, as must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.
- Variant: We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.

What is the use of a religion without a mythos, since religion means, if anything, precisely that function which links us back to eternal myth?

When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.

Whenever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator state, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

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

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart ... Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.

"Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar's gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart throught the world. There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul."

Misattributions

Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit.
- Called or uncalled, God is present.
- This is actually a statement that Jung discovered among the Latin writings of Erasmus, who declared the statement had been an ancient Spartan proverb. Jung popularized it, having it inscribed over the doorway of his house, and upon his tomb.
- Variant translations: Summoned or not summoned, God is present.
  Invoked or not invoked, God is present
  Called or not called, the god will be there.
  Bidden or unbidden, God is present.
  Bidden or not bidden, God is present.
  Bidden or not, God is present.
  Bidden or not bidden, God is there.
  Called or uncalled, God is there.