Top 12 Most Famous Carl G. Jung Quotes
The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.
— Carl Jung
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
— Carl Jung
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
— Carl Jung
I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.
— Carl Jung
We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.
— Carl Jung
Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
— Carl Jung
The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.
— Carl Jung
A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.
— Carl Jung
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.
— Carl Jung
In each of us there is another whom we do not know.
— Carl Jung
The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.
— Carl Jung
Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.
— Carl Jung
Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.
— Carl Jung
Inspirational Carl Jung Quotes about Self and Change
A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
— Carl Jung
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people.
— Carl Jung
Looking outwards has got to be turned into looking into oneself. Discovering yourself provides you with all you are, were meant to be, and all you are living from and for.
— Carl Jung
A dream that is not understood remains a mere occurrence; understood it becomes a living experience.
— Carl Jung
Shrinking away from death is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.
— Carl Jung
There is no coming to consciousness without pain.
— Carl Jung
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
— Carl Jung
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.
— Carl Jung
The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.
— Carl Jung
How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole.
— Carl Jung
I don’t aspire to be a good man. I aspire to be a whole man.
— Carl Jung
Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries.
— Carl Jung
Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.
— Carl Jung
Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.
— Carl Jung
You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.
— Carl Jung
We cannot change anything unless we accept it.
— Carl Jung
The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.
— Carl Jung
I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.
— Carl Jung
The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
— Carl Jung
The capacity for directed thinking I call intellect; the capacity for passive or undirected thinking I call intellectual intuition.
— Carl Jung
Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.
— Carl Jung
To ask the right question is already half the solution of a problem.
— Carl Jung
To me dreams are part of nature, which harbors no intention to deceive but expresses something as best it can.
— Carl Jung
If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.
— Carl Jung
Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.
— Carl Jung
Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
— Carl Jung
Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
— Carl Jung
It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how things are in themselves.
— Carl Jung
The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.
— Carl Jung
For better to come, good must stand aside.
— Carl Jung
No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.
— Carl Jung
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.
— Carl Jung
Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.
— Carl Jung
The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.
— Carl Jung
Best Carl Jung Quotes
A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.
— Carl Jung
One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.
— Carl Jung
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
— Carl Jung
The word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
— Carl Jung
The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.
— Carl Jung
Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.
— Carl Jung
Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.
— Carl Jung
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 lasting results.
— Carl Jung
When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.
— Carl Jung
If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.
— Carl Jung
Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
— Carl Jung
Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.
— Carl Jung
Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.
— Carl Jung
Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.
— Carl Jung
The collective unconscious consists of the sum of the instincts and their correlates, the archetypes. Just as everybody possesses instincts, so he also possesses a stock of archetypal images.
— Carl Jung
Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.
— Carl Jung
I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life – that is to say, over 35 – there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.
— Carl Jung
We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learnt to bear its ills without being overcome by them.
— Carl Jung
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.
— Carl Jung
Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. Why should I henceforth not love my dreams and not make their riddling images into objects of my daily consideration?
— Carl Jung
Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.
— Carl Jung
The man who promises everything is sure to fulfil nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition.
— Carl Jung
Man’s task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.
— Carl Jung
All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.
— Carl Jung
It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.
— Carl Jung
Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
— Carl Jung
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
— Carl Jung
Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.
— Carl Jung
In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.
— Carl Jung
Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
— Carl Jung
The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.
— Carl Jung
It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.
— Carl Jung
Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.
— Carl Jung
The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
— Carl Jung
We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything more.
— Carl Jung
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.
— Carl Jung
There is no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert. Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum.
— Carl Jung
For a young person, it is almost a sin, or at least a danger, to be too preoccupied with himself; but for the ageing person, it is a duty and a necessity to devote serious attention to himself.
— Carl Jung
Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own.
— Carl Jung
There is no birth of consciousness without pain.
— Carl Jung
A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.
— Carl Jung
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?
— Carl Jung
We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.
— Carl Jung
Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.
— Carl Jung
We shall probably get nearest to the truth if we think of the conscious and personal psyche as resting upon the broad basis of an inherited and universal psychic disposition which is as such unconscious, and that our personal psyche bears the same relation to the collective psyche as the individual to society.
— Carl Jung
Understanding does not cure evil, but it is a definite help, inasmuch as one can cope with a comprehensible darkness.
— Carl Jung
A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.
— Carl Jung
The Christ-symbol is of the greatest importance for psychology in so far as it is perhaps the most highly developed and differentiated symbol of the self, apart from the figure of the Buddha.
— Carl Jung
The word ‘belief’ is a difficult thing for me. I don’t believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it – I don’t need to believe it.
— Carl Jung
A ‘scream’ is always just that – a noise and not music.
— Carl Jung
In my case Pilgrim’s Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.
— Carl Jung
Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.
— Carl Jung
Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.
— Carl Jung
Our heart glows, and secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. Dealing with the unconscious has become a question of life for us.
— Carl Jung
The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor naked heathen, but the spiritual heathen who populate Europe have as yet heard nothing of Christianity.
— Carl Jung
Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.
— Carl Jung
Everyone knows nowadays that people ‘have complexes’. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.
— Carl Jung
In the child, consciousness rises out of the depths of unconscious psychic life, at first like separate islands, which gradually unite to form a ‘continent,’ a continuous landmass of consciousness. Progressive mental development means, in effect, extension of consciousness.
— Carl Jung
We are in a far better position to observe instincts in animals or in primitives than in ourselves. This is due to the fact that we have grown accustomed to scrutinizing our own actions and to seeking rational explanations for them.
— Carl Jung
The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid.
— Carl Jung
Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better.
— Carl Jung
Just as we might take Darwin as an example of the normal extraverted thinking type, the normal introverted thinking type could be represented by Kant. The one speaks with facts, the other relies on the subjective factor. Darwin ranges over the wide field of objective reality, Kant restricts himself to a critique of knowledge.
— Carl Jung