Collected Meditations
Showing 75 quotesEveryone knows nowadays that people 'have complexes'. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.— Carl Jung
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.— Carl Jung
Understanding does not cure evil, but it is a definite help, inasmuch as one can cope with a comprehensible darkness.— Carl Jung
Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.— Carl Jung
topics:
Future
The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid.— Carl Jung
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?— Carl Jung
topics:
History
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.— Carl Jung
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.— Carl Jung
The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.— Carl Jung
We shall probably get nearest to the truth if we think of the conscious and personal psyche as resting upon the broad basis of an inherited and universal psychic disposition which is as such unconscious, and that our personal psyche bears the same relation to the collective psyche as the individual to society.— Carl Jung
All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.— Carl Jung
topics:
Imagination
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.— Carl Jung
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.— Carl Jung
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.— Carl Jung
topics:
Knowledge
Shrinking away from death is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.— Carl Jung
topics:
Death