Carl Jung Quotes

In fact, the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious

The Jungian view of drama would be that it affects all of our imaginations and somehow taps into our hidden, ancient, primordial memories.

I'm just trying to make a smudge on the collective unconscious.

My own bias in folkloristics is decidedly psychoanalytic. I believe that the vast majority of folklore concerns fantasy, and because of that, I am persuaded that techniques of analyzing fantasy are relevant to folklore data.

Symbols are specific acts or figures, while myths develop and elaborate these symbols into a story which contains characters and several episodes. The myth is thus more inclusive. But both symbol and myth have the same function psychologically; they are man's way of expressing the quintessence of his experience - his way of seeing his life, his self-image and his relations to the world of his fellow men and of nature - in a total figure which at the same moment carries the vital meaning of this experience.

Through dreams a door is opened to mythology, since myths are of the nature of dreams, and that, as dreams arise from an inward world unknown to waking consciousness, so do myths: so, indeed, does life.

All one's personality is embedded in gloves and hats after they've been good and used. Show me a glove and I'll tell you the character of its owner.

We all have one, in one form or another. To me, this dragon is both the wild nature of ourselves and our conscience in his embodiment of the Old Code ethical behavior and morality. At the same time, he's our unconscious, the place from which our dreams arise. I just spoke my lines to the dragon within me.

I suspect that the theme, the nature of the characters, and the method of getting from the beginning of the play to the end is already established in the unconscious.

That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer.

The great thing about fairy tales and myths is that they go beyond character. They're not about character. They're about more basic things. They're about basic fears or longings or desires or fantasies, and stuff like that.

Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.

The great problems of life — sexuality, of course, among others — are always related to the primordial images of the collective unconscious. These images are really balancing or compensating factors which correspond with the problems life presents in actuality. This is not to be marveled at, since these images are deposits representing the accumulated experience of thousands of years of struggle for adaptation and existence.

In a sense, what's happening is that the unconscious mind is a luxury the human species cannot afford at this point in our dilemma, and so the unconscious mind is simply rising into consciousness by being hardwired into this global infrastructure.

The voice is not only indicative of man's character, but it is the expression of his spirit. Other sounds can be louder than the voice, but no sound can be more living.

As Dr. Sigmund Freud has observed, it can not even be said that the State has ever shown any disposition to suppress crime, but only to safeguard its own monopoly of crime.

The history of mankind is his character.

The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semihuman, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, "divine."

You know, when you're in your twenties you use a great deal of symbolism. You somehow think that a character standing beneath a cross is more interesting than a character standing underneath a billboard, but when you get a little older you realize that there's not much difference.

Sometimes small incidents, rather than glorious exploits, give us the best evidence of character. So, as portrait painters are more exact in doing the face, where the character is revealed, than the rest of the body, I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks of the souls of men.

About dreams. It is usually taken for granted that you dream of something that has made a particularly strong impression on you during the day, but it seems to me it´s just the contrary. Often it´s something you paid no attention to at the time -- a vague thought that you didn´t bother to think out to the end, words spoken without feeling and which passed unnoticed -- these are the things that return at night, clothed in flesh and blood, and they become the subjects of dreams, as if to make up for having been ignored during waking hours.

The sound and proper exercise of the imagination may be made to contribute to the cultivation of all that is virtuous and estimable in the human character.

The unconsciousness of man is the consciousness of God.

As we have come to understand the psychology of evil, we have realized that such transformations of human character are not as rare as we would like to believe. Historical inquiry and behavioral science have demonstrated the "banality of evil" -- that is, under certain conditions and social pressures, ordinary people can commit acts that would otherwise be unthinkable.

Vermont tradition is based on the idea that group life should leave each person as free as possible to arrange his own life. This freedom is the only climate in which (we feel) a human being may create his own happiness. ... Character itself lies deep and secret below the surface, unknown and unknowable by others. It is the mysterious core of life, which every man or woman has to cope with alone, to live with, to conquer and put in order, or to be defeated by.