Carl Jung: Man and His Symbols - Quotations

. . . inner motives spring from a deep source that is not made by consciousness and is not under its control. In the mythology of earlier times, these forces were called mana, or spirits, demons, and gods. They are as active today as ever. If they go against us, then we say that it is just bad luck, or that certain people are against us. The one thing we refuse to admit is that we are dependent upon "powers" that are beyond our control. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 71.

We . . . can become dissociated and lose our identity. We can be possessed . . . by moods, or become unreasonable, so that people ask: "What the devil has got into you?" We talk about . . . "control", but self-control is a rare and remarkable virtue. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 8.

He must concern himself with psychic realities, even if he cannot embody them in scientific definitions. That is why no textbook can teach psychology; one learns only by actual experience. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 83.

Even if we did not know by reason our need for salt in our food, we should nonetheless profit from its use. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 76

Consciousness is a very recent acquisition of nature, and it is still in an "experimental" state. It is frail . . . and easily injured. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols; Page 6.

It is commonly assumed that on some given occasion in prehistoric times, the basic mythological ideas were "invented" by a clever old philosopher or prophet, and ever afterward "believed" by a credulous and uncritical people. But the very word "invent" is derived from the Latin invenire, and means "to find" and hence to find something by "seeking" it. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 69.

Many people mistakenly overestimate the role of will power and think that nothing can happen to their minds that they do not decide and intend. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols, Page 22

We can find clear proof of this fact in the history of science itself. The so-called "mystical" experience of the French philosopher Descartes involved a . . . sudden revelation in which he saw in a flash the "order of all sciences". The British author Robert Louis Stevenson had spent years looking for a story that would fit his "strong sense of man's double being," when the plot of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was suddenly revealed to him in a dream. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 25.

A remarkable instance of this can be found in the Eleusinian mysteries, which were finally suppressed in the beginning of the seventh century of the Christian era. They expressed, together with the Delphic oracle, the essence and spirit of ancient Greece. On a much greater scale, the Christian era itself owes its name and significance to the antique mystery of the god-man, which has its roots in the archetypal Osiris-Horus myth of ancient Egypt. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 68.

We find . . . in everyday life, where dilemmas are sometimes solved by the most surprising new propositions; many artists, philosophers, and even scientists owe some of their best ideas to inspirations . . . from the unconscious. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 25

Anthropologists have often described what happens to a primitive society when its spiritual values are exposed to the impact of modern civilization. Its people lose the meaning of their lives, their social organization disintegrates, and they themselves morally decay. We are now in the same condition. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 84

. . . we constantly use symbolic terms to represent concepts that we cannot define or fully comprehend. This is one of the reasons why all religions employ symbolic language or images. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 4

Because a child is . . . small and its conscious thoughts scarce and simple, we do not realize the far-reaching complications of the infantile mind that are based on its original identity with the prehistoric psyche. That original mind is just as much present and still functioning in the child as the evolutionary stages of mankind are in its embryonic body. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 89.

The sad truth is that man's real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites . . . day and night . . . birth and death . . . happiness and misery . . . good and evil. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 75.

. . . one must learn . . . between intentional and unintentional contents of the mind. The former are derived from the ego personality; the latter, however, arise from a source that is not identical with the ego, but is its "other side". ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 22.

Life is a battleground. It always has been, and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 75

A story told by the conscious mind has a beginning, a development, and an end but the same is not true of the dream. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 12.

Consciousness naturally resists anything unconscious and unknown ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 17.

If you observe a neurotic person, you see him doing many things that he appears to be doing consciously and purposively, yet if you ask him about them, you will discover that he is either unconscious of them or has something quite different in mind. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 19.

When something slips out of our consciousness it does not cease to exist…It is simply out of sight. Thus part of the unconscious consists of multitudes of temporarily obscured thoughts, impressions and images that, in spite of being lost, continue to influence our conscious minds. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols, Page 18.

. . . so many physicians dismiss statements by hysterical patients as utter lies. Such persons certainly produce more untruths than most of us, but "lie" is scarcely the right word to use. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 19.

Freud and Josef Breuer recognized that neurotic symptoms… are in fact symbolically meaningful. They are one way in which the unconscious mind expresses itself. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 9.

This capacity to isolate part of one’s mind, indeed, is a valuable characteristic. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 8.

Forgetting . . . is a normal process, in which certain conscious ideas lose their specific energy because one's attention has been deflected. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 20

. . . "civilized” man reacts to new ideas by erecting psychological barriers to protect himself from the shock of facing something new. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 17.

Man . . . never perceives anything fully or comprehends anything completely. He can see, hear, touch, and taste; but how far he sees, how well he hears, what his touch tells him, and what he tastes depend upon the number and quality of his senses. These limit his perception of the world around him. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 4.

Primitive man was much more governed by his instincts than are his "rational" modern descendants, who have learned to "control" themselves. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 36.

Myths go back to the primitive storyteller and his dreams, to men moved by the stirring of their fantasies. These people were not very different from those whom later generations called poets or philosophers. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 78

…it is plain foolishness to believe in ready-made systematic guides to dream interpretation, as if one could simply buy a reference book and look up a particular symbol. ~Carl Jung, Man and his Symbols, Page 53.

The word ‘matter’ remains a dry, inhuman, and purely intellectual concept… How different was the former image of matter—the Great Mother—that could encompass and express the profound emotional meaning of the Great Mother. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, pages 94-5.

A man likes to believe that he is master of his soul. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 83.

But as long as he [Man] is unable to control his moods and emotions, or to be conscious of the myriad secret ways in which unconscious factors insinuate themselves into his arrangements and decisions, he is certainly not his own master. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 83.

The individual is the only reality. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 58.

Their [Pueblo Indians] plight is infinitely more satisfactory than that of a man in our own civilization who knows that he is (and will remain) nothing more than an underdog with no inner meaning to his life. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 89.

The Pueblo Indians believe that they are the sons of Father Sun, and this belief endows their life with a perspective (and a goal) that goes far beyond their limited existence. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 89.

Dreams have influenced all the important changes in my life and theories. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 85.

I concluded that only the material that is clearly and visibly part of a dream should be used in interpreting it. The dream has its own limitation. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 29

Dreams may sometimes announce certain situations long before they actually happen. This is not necessarily a miracle or a form of precognition. Many crises in our lives have a long unconscious history. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 29

No genius has ever sat down with a pen or a brush in his hand and said: “Now I am going to invent a symbol.” ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 55.

In other words, though an individual’s visible personality may seem quite normal, he may well be concealing from others—or even from himself—the deplorable condition of “the woman within.” ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 31.

Dream symbols are the essential message carriers from the instinctive to the rational parts of the human mind, and their interpretation enriches the poverty of consciousness so that it learns to understand again the forgotten language of the instincts. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 52

In the Middle Ages, long before the physiologists demonstrated that by reason of our glandular structure there are both male and female elements in all of us, it was said that “every man carries a woman within himself.” ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 31.

The universal hero myth always refers to a powerful man or god-man who vanquishes evil in the form of dragons, serpents, monsters, demons, and so on, and who liberates his people from destruction and death. The narration or ritual repetition of sacred texts and ceremonies, and the worship of such a figure with dances, music, hymns, prayers, and sacrifices, grip the audience with numinous emotions and exalt the individual to an identification with the hero. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 68.

Goethe's Faust aptly says: “in the beginning was the deed”." "Deeds" were never invented, they were done; thoughts, on the other hand, are a relatively late discovery of man. First he was moved to deeds by unconscious factors; it was only a long time afterward that he began to reflect upon the causes that had moved him; and it took it him a very long time indeed to arrive at the preposterous idea that he must have moved himself . . . his mind being unable to identify any other motivating force than his own. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 70.

. . . there are millions . . . who have lost faith in any kind of religion. Such people do not understand their religion any longer. While life runs smoothly without religion . . . when suffering comes, it is another matter. That is when people seek a way out and to reflect about the meaning of life and its bewildering and painful experiences. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 75

The universal hero myth always refers to a powerful man or god-man who vanquishes evil in the form of dragons, serpents, monsters, demons, and so on, and who liberates his people from destruction and death. The narration or ritual repetition of sacred texts and ceremonies, and the worship of such a figure with dances, music, hymns, prayers, and sacrifices, grip the audience with numinous emotions and exalt the individual to an identification with the hero. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 68.

Goethe's Faust aptly says: “in the beginning was the deed”." "Deeds" were never invented, they were done; thoughts, on the other hand, are a relatively late discovery of man. First he was moved to deeds by unconscious factors; it was only a long time afterward that he began to reflect upon the causes that had moved him; and it took it him a very long time indeed to arrive at the preposterous idea that he must have moved himself . . . his mind being unable to identify any other motivating force than his own. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 70.

There is no difference in principle between organic and psychic growth. As a plant produces its flower, so the psyche creates its symbols. Every dream is evidence of this process. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 64.

Archetypes, in spite of their conservative nature, are not static but in a continuous dramatic flux. Thus the self as a monad or continuous unit would be dead. But it lives inasmuch as it splits and unites again. There is no energy without opposites! This is unavoidable, for consciousness can keep only a few images in full clarity at one time, and even this clarity fluctuates. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 20.

Aside from normal forgetting . . . several cases that involve the "forgetting" of disagreeable memories . . . memories that one is only too ready to lose. As Nietzsche remarked, where pride is insistent enough, memory prefers to give way. Thus, among the lost memories, we encounter not a few that owe their subliminal state . . . to their disagreeable and incompatible nature. The psychologist calls these repressed contents. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 22.

. . . I simply want to point out that the capacity of the human psyche to produce such new material is particularly significant when one is dealing with the dream symbolism . . . ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 26.

The ability to reach a rich vein of such material, and to translate it effectively . . . is commonly called genius. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 25