Quotes from Carl Jung

God is not a statistical truth, hence it is just as stupid to try to prove the existence of God as to deny him. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II

We may think there is a safe road. But that would be the road of death. Then nothing happens any longer – at any rate, not the right things. Anyone who takes the safe road is as good as dead.

if you take a personal problem seriously enough, you will simultaneously solve a social problem

in reality only a change in the attitude of the individual can bring about a renewal in the spirit of nations. Everything begins with the individual.

The archetypal image decides the fate of man.

That is the great and liberating thing about any genuine personality: he voluntarily sacrifices himself to his vocation, and consciously translates into his own individual reality what would only lead to ruin if it were lived unconsciously by the group

As a child, I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissable.

If such a compensatory move of the unconscious is not integrated into consciousness in an individual, it leads to a neurosis or even to a psychosis.

The more a person shrinks from adapting himself to reality, the greater becomes the fear which increasingly besets his path at every point. Thus a vicious circle is formed: fear of life and people causes more shrinking back, and this in turn leads to infantilism and finally "into the mother".

There is no recipe for living that suits all cases.

A dream that is not understood remains a mere occurrence; understood it becomes a living experience.

We analyse dreams to help us with problems because, as Jung says, "the problem is much greater than I, and it is wise to hold fast to the words the dream gives, because one cannot expect to be wiser than nature".

To the superficial observer, it will appear like madness.

The soul needs your recklessness, not your wisdom.

We should not try to "get rid" of a neurosis, but rather to experience what it means, what it has to teach, what its purpose is.

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.

In constructing a theory which derives the neurosis from causes in the distant past, we are first and foremost following the tendency of our patient to lure us as far away as possible from the critical present…It is mainly in the present that the affective causes lie, and here alone are the possibilities of removing them.

When you come to that loneliness with yourself-when you are eternally alone-you are forced in upon yourself and are bound to become aware of your background

It makes no difference that there were already conflicts in childhood, for the conflicts in childhood are different from the conflict of adults. Those who have suffered ever since childhood from a chronic neurosis do not suffer now from the same conflict they suffered from then.

I am the true medicine [says Wisdom], correcting and transmuting that which is no longer into that which it was before its corruption, and that which is not into that which it ought to be." * (Ibid., p. 459).

that is, towards the unconscious, the only available source of religious experience.

we] have a mighty dislike of all intentional effort and are addicted to absolute laziness until circumstances prod [us] into action.

whereby the planetary spirits who are needed in order to unite the spirit or soul with the body, and to transform the latter, are compelled to descend

truth is the supreme virtue and an impregnable stronghold" * (p. 458).