"I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished."
Quote collection
Carl Jung quotes (page 11 of 42)
822 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Invited or not, God is present."
"We cannot change anything unless we accept it."
"I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud."
"Remember that the only God man comes in contact with is his own God, called Spirit, Soul and Mind, or Consciousness, and these three are one."
"Knowledge does not enrich us; it removes us more and more from the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth."
"How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole"
"It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world color and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I can "experience" is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are . . . enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images."
"We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos - the right moment - for a 'metamorphosis of the gods', of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing."
"Projection [of our own shadow] makes the whole world a replica of our own unknown face."
"The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories."
"A man's hatred is always concentrated upon that which makes him conscious of his bad qualities."
"Religion is a defense against the experience of God."
"I would rather be whole than good."
"Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains."
"All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination."
"Conflicts create the fire of affects and emotions; and like every fire it has two aspects: that of burning and that of giving light."
"Individuation is to divest the self of false wrappings."
"To confront a person with their own shadow is to show them their own light."
"What is not brought to consciousness, comes to us as fate."