Carl Jung Quotes

Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave.

We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.

We live in this miraculous technological environment, and yet our human behaviour is still governed by basic impulses from prehistoric times.

It can be argued that man's instinct to gamble is the only reason he is still not a monkey up in the trees.

Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche. Just as the human body connects us with the mammals and displays numerous relics of earlier evolutionary stages going back to even the reptilian age, so the human psyche is likewise a product of evolution which, when followed up to its origins, show countless archaic traits.

We're animals, I think we forget that. I think there is an ancient archetypal memory that still exists within us. If we deny that, what is the cost? So I do think it's what binds us as human beings.

Psychoanalysis , which interprets the human being as a socialized being, and the psychic apparatus as essentially developed and determined through the relationship of the individual to society, must consider it a duty to participate in the investigation of sociological problems to the extent the human being or his/her psyche plays any part at all.

The conscious life of the mind is of small importance in comparison with its unconscious life.

The civilized man is a larger mind but a more imperfect nature than the savage.

The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution born anew in the brain structure of every individual.

We talk of wild animals but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.

We must recognise the essential underlaying savagery in the animal called man, and return to older and sounder principles of national life and defense. We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake.

There is indeed the possibility that the evolutionary process has, in gray antiquity, bred into us an excess of aggression.

Everybody has a dark side. It's just we are very in touch with it.

We became Homo sapiens not that long ago, from the scientific perspective, and we've retained a lot of our beast nature. We've done all these amazing things in terms of our knowledge base and technology, and now we're flying around and using the Internet. But we're still very animalistic.

I grew up reading thrillers, science fiction, fantasy - you name it - and one day I asked myself if there was a reason why a fear of spiders was so common. Was there something buried deep in our evolutionary history that made being scared of spiders a survival instinct?

I surely don't think ignorance is bliss. But like everything else that has survived thousands of years of human evolution, ignorance - like denial, self-delusion, and magical thinking - seems to have its uses.

The unconscious wants to flow into consciousness in order to reach the light, but at the same time it continually thwarts itself, because it would rather remain unconscious. That is to say, God wants to become man, but not quite.

I want to talk about the nature of human beings or how we're evolving as a race.

We're just recycled history machines, cavemen in faded blue jeans.

Civilization merely develops man's capacity for a greater variety of sensations, and ... absolutely nothing else.

My characters are more like men than these real men are, see. They're rough and rude, they got hands and they got bellies. They hate and they lust; break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed.

We are all civilized people, wich means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour.

In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep.

The unconscious is the unwritten history of mankind from time unrecorded.