Carl Jung

Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.

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

The collective unconscious consists of the sum of the instincts and their correlates, the archetypes. Just as everybody possesses instincts, so he also possesses a stock of archetypal images.

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.

The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid.

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

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.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

For a young person, it is almost a sin, or at least a danger, to be too preoccupied with himself; but for the ageing person, it is a duty and a necessity to devote serious attention to himself.

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

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

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

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

There is no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert. Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum.

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

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.

If there is anything that 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.

We are in a far better position to observe instincts in animals or in primitives than in ourselves. This is due to the fact that we have grown accustomed to scrutinizing our own actions and to seeking rational explanations for them.

In the child, consciousness rises out of the depths of unconscious psychic life, at first like separate islands, which gradually unite to form a 'continent,' a continuous landmass of consciousness. Progressive mental development means, in effect, extension of consciousness.

In my case Pilgrim's Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.

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.

The Christ-symbol is of the greatest importance for psychology in so far as it is perhaps the most highly developed and differentiated symbol of the self, apart from the figure of the Buddha.

The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor naked heathen, but the spiritual heathen who populate Europe have as yet heard nothing of Christianity.

Just as we might take Darwin as an example of the normal extraverted thinking type, the normal introverted thinking type could be represented by Kant. The one speaks with facts, the other relies on the subjective factor. Darwin ranges over the wide field of objective reality, Kant restricts himself to a critique of knowledge.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

Everyone knows nowadays that people 'have complexes'. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.

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

A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.

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

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.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

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

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

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

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.

A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.

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

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

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.

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.