Jung Quote

"Things which have the most powerful effect upon children do not come from the conscious state of the parents but from their unconscious background." — C.G. Jung

"Anything unexpected that approaches us from that dark realm is regarded either as coming from outside and therefore as real, or else as an hallucination and therefore not true. The idea that anything could be real or true which does not come from outside has hardly begun to dawn on contemporary man."

"Nobody can escape suffering, and to try to escape passion is to try to escape suffering. But as you cannot escape suffering you cannot escape passion; you will suffer from passion either directly or indirectly, and it is much better to suffer directly because indirect suffering has no merit. It is exactly as if nothing has happened. So the indirect suffering in a neurosis has no moral merit. Years lost in neurosis are just lost, without gain."

"We usurp something by giving it a name. We say it is this and nothing else, and think we have the purest substance of the thing when we name it."

"Virtues, like all things which are named and specified, easily get into a quarrel; a virtue which is named has the disagreeable quality of being very imperious. Justice, being named, wants to be nothing but justice."

"There is, prior to consciousness, an unconscious out of which consciousness once arose, and that is an intelligence which surely exceeds our intelligence in an indefinite way."

"The ego consciousness is the shepherd of a flock of psychical units, and if the shepherd is killed, the flock disperses."

"An intuition amounts to nothing if it has no positive results, and it has not always positive results. One thing is certain; if you have an intuition about a thing, you have not been there. You still have to make the way."

"As long as you can explain yourself and feel the need of explaining yourself to a human being, and succeed more or less, you are not crazy."

"Civilization is nothing but a widening out or intensification of consciousness, and the fate of increasing consciousness is threatening everybody."

"It is the body, the feeling, the instincts, which connect us with the soil. If you give up the past you naturally detach from the past; you lose your roots in the soil, your connection with the totem ancestors that dwell in your soil. You turn outward and drift away, and try to conquer other lands because you are exiled from your own soil. That is inevitable. The feet will walk away and the head cannot retain them because it also is looking out for something. That is the Will, always wandering over the surface of the earth, always seeking something."

"It is really true that an individual is not only characterized by what he was originally, by birth and by inherited disposition; he is also that which he is seeking."

"Any human disposition is somewhat imperfect, and the more it is imperfect, the more you will seek a goal of perfection which compensates your defect. But then the goal is equally faulty. Then the goal doesn't coincide with the goals of other people, and under those conditions you really don't collaborate with them."

"If you are always preparing for the happiness of the children, you don't know how to look after your own happiness, nor do your children learn how to look after theirs."

"Don't be unnatural and seek happiness in the next generations. If you are too concerned about your children and grandchildren, you simply burden them with the debts you have contracted."

"The individual gets cut off from his roots if he tries to use the roots of other people."