Daily Inspiration Quote by Carl Jung

Jung frames imagination less as a decorative extra and more as the upstream source of everything we later congratulate ourselves for calling “real.” The line is built as a small rhetorical trap: first, a sweeping claim (“all the works of man”), then the deliberately loaded engine (“creative fantasy”), and finally the moral pivot - “What right…” - which turns a philosophical point into an ethical rebuke. He’s not merely defending daydreams; he’s prosecuting a culture that treats imagination as childish while cashing its checks in art, religion, science, and nation-building.

The subtext is classic Jung: fantasy isn’t escapism, it’s psyche at work. In his model, the unconscious speaks in images, myths, and symbols; imagination is one of the few channels through which inner life negotiates with outer demands. To “depreciate” it is to deny the very medium by which humans assemble meaning - then wonder why modern life feels sterile, anxious, or spiritually underfed.

Context matters. Jung is writing against early 20th-century positivism and a clinical mood that wanted the mind to behave like a machine: measurable, rational, hygienic. Freud reduced fantasy to disguised wish; Jung insists it can be generative, even civilizational. The quote also slyly implicates the reader: if your career, your politics, your self-image began as a story you told yourself, you’re already living off imagination. The only question is whether you’re willing to respect it - or keep pretending your “serious” life sprang from pure fact.