I know that in many things I am not like others, but I do not know what I really am like. Man cannot compare himself with any other creature; he is not a monkey, not...

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

Great talents are the most lovely and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off.

We live in a time when there dawns upon us a realization that the people on the other side of the mountain are not made up exclusively of redheaded devils responsible for all the evil...

What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak to the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit...

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

The word ‘happiness’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

The true leader is always led

It is indeed time for the clergyman and the psychotherapist to join forces

The life of man is a dubious experiment. It is a tremendous phenomenon only in numerical terms. Individually, it is so fleeting, so insufficient, that it is literally a miracle that anything can exist and...

I maintained that psychiatry, in the broadest sense, is a dialogue between the sick psyche and the psyche of the doctor, which is presumed to be ‘normal.’ It is a coming to terms between the...

One is forced to speak not of what is held in common between the cultures, but what is held in common between the myths, and that in its simplest archetypal forms

The main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy,...

The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid.

You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible toinfluence.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word...

Only what is really oneself has the power to heal.

My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest. Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light.

The wise man who is not heeded is counted a fool, and the fool who proclaims the general folly first and loudest passes for a prophet and Fnhrer, and sometimes it is luckily the other...

The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and...

Nothing worse could happen to one than to be completely understood

Caution has its place, no doubt, but we cannot refuse our support to a serious venture which challenges the whole of the personality. If we oppose it, we are trying to suppress what is best...

A “”scream”” is always just that-a noise and not music.

My aim was to show that delusions and hallucinations were not just specific symptoms of mental disease but also had a human meaning.

It is on the whole probably that we continually dream, but that consciousness makes such a noise that we do not hear it.

Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality.

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgement of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, as...

An old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as a young man who is unable to embrace it.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.

Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

Psychoanalysis cannot be considered a method of education if by education we mean the topiary art of clipping a tree into a beautiful artificial shape. But those who have a higher conception of education will...

Because the European does not know his own unconscious, he does not understand the East and projects it into everything he fears and despises in himself

Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.

The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life.

The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life.

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

Today as never before it is important that human beings should not overlook the danger of the evil lurking withing them. It is unfortunately only too real, which is why psychology must insist on the...

At the moment I am looking into astrology, which seems indispensable for a proper understanding of mythology. There are strange and wondrous things in these lands of darkness. Please, don’t worry about my wanderings in...