Quotes by "Carl Jung"

The greatest and most important problems in life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.

We cannot change anything unless we accept it.

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

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment, and especially on their children, than the unlived lives of the parents.

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 a vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.

The only thing we have to fear on this planet is man.

So they speak soothingly about progress and the greatest possible happiness, forgetting that happiness is itself poisoned if the measure of suffering has not been fulfilled.

Seldom, or perhaps never, does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.

We should know what our convictions are, and stand for them. Upon one's own philosophy, conscious or unconscious, depends one's ultimate interpretation of facts. Therefore it is wise to be as clear as possible about one's subjective principles. As the man is, so will be his ultimate truth.

The primary cause of unhappiness in the world today is ... lack of faith.

I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success of money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears.

The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith.

Blind acceptance never leads to a solution; at best it leads only to a standstill and is paid for heavily in the next generation.

With a truly tragic delusion,” Carl Jung noted, “these theologians fail to see that it is not a matter of proving the existence of the light, but of blind people who do not know that their eyes could see. It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing.

It is a common illusion to believe that what we know today is all we ever can know. Nothing is more vulnerable than scientific theory, which is an ephemeral attempt to explain facts and not an everlasting truth in itself.

Man is bound to follow the exploits of his scientific and inventive mind and to admire himself for his splendid achievements. At the same time, he cannot help admitting that his genius shows an uncanny tendency to invent things that become more and more dangerous, because they represent better and better means for wholesale suicide. In view of the rapidly increasing avalanche of world population, we have already begun to seek ways and means of keeping the rising flood at bay. But nature may anticipate all our attempts by turning against man his own creative mind, and, by releasing the H-bomb or some equally catastrophic device, put an effective stop to overpopulation. In spite of our proud domination of nature we are still her victims as much as ever and have not even learnt to control our own nature, which slowly and inevitably courts disaster.

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

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.