Talk:Carl Jung

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• A shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. See above "Modern Man in Search of a Soul" p. 69

• 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.

• 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 throughout 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.

• 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 to 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. (In a film, when asked if he believed that God exists.)

• I have never encountered a difficulty that was not truly the difficulty of myself.

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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 cannot stand too much reality.

• 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.

• 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.

• Superstition and accident manifest the will of God.

• 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 foundation of all mental illness is the avoidance of true suffering.

• 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 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 psyche is a self-regulating system that maintains its equilibrium just as the body does. Every process that goes too far immediately and inevitably calls forth compensations, and without these their would be neither a normal metabolism nor a normal psyche. In this sense we can take the theory of compensation as a basic law of psychic behavior. Too little on one side results in too much on the other. Similarly, the relation between conscious and unconscious is compensatory.

• 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...

• 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.

• 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.