Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung’s work was influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, and religious studies. Profoundly inspirational Carl Jung quotes will challenge the way you think, change the way you live and transform your whole life.
Famous Carl Jung Quotes
The ability to ask questions is the greatest resource in learning the truth. – Carl Jung
Neurosis is the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning. – Carl Jung
True art is creation, and creation is beyond all theories. That is why I say to any beginner: Learn your theories as well as you can but put them aside when you touch the miracle of the living soul. Not theories but your own creative individuality alone must decide. – Carl Jung
One is always in the dark about one’s own personality. One needs others to get to know oneself. – Carl Jung
That which you do not bring to consciousness comes to you as your Fate, that which you do bring to consciousness, whether it was what you thought you wanted or not, is your destiny. – Carl Jung
You must go in quest of yourself, and you will find yourself again only in the simple and forgotten things. – Carl Jung
The greater the tension, the greater is the potential. – 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
It is a bewildering thing in human life that the things that cause the greatest fear is the source of the greatest wisdom. – Carl Jung
Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge. – Carl Jung
What is not brought to consciousness, comes to us as fate. – Carl Jung
The true leader is always led. – Carl Jung
What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and our feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it. The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning. – Carl Jung
Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the Shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular. – Carl Jung
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness’s of other people. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely. Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams, who looks inside, awakes. – Carl Jung
Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism. – Carl Jung
If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool. – Carl Jung
If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance towards oneself can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures. – Carl Jung
If our religion is based on salvation, our chief emotions will be fear and trembling. If our religion is based on wonder, our chief emotion will be gratitude. – Carl Jung
The whole point of Jesus’s life was not that we should become exactly like him, but that we should become ourselves in the same way he became himself. Jesus was not the great exception but the great example. – Carl Jung
Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often a torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words. – Carl Jung
The years… when I pursued the inner images were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything was then. – Carl Jung
Synchronicity is an ever-present reality for those who have eyes to see. – Carl Jung
Enchantment is the oldest form of medicine. – Carl Jung
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being. Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart … Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens. The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach. – Carl Jung
It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves. – Carl Jung
All fanaticism is repressed doubt. – Carl Jung
We don’t get wounded alone and we don’t heal alone. – Carl Jung
Nothing worse could happen to one than to be completely understood. – Carl Jung
I’ve realized that somebody who’s tired and needs a rest and goes on working all the same is a fool. – Carl Jung
As a plant produces its flower, so the psyche creates its symbols. – Carl Jung
Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk. – Carl Jung
Contemporary man is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality and efficiency, he is possessed by powers that are beyond his control. His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. They keep him on the run with restlessness, vague apprehensions, psychological complications, an insatiable need for pills, alcohol, tobacco, food – and, above all, a large array of neuroses – Carl Jung
We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life. – Carl Jung
Nothing is possible without love … For love puts one in a mood to risk everything. – Carl Jung
We discover ourselves through others. – Carl Jung
We don’t so much solve our problems as we outgrow them. We add capacities and experiences that eventually make us bigger than the problems. – Carl Jung
The attainment of wholeness requires one to stake one’s whole being. Nothing less will do; there can be no easier conditions, no substitutes, no compromises. – Carl Jung
The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are. – Carl Jung
Where love stops, power begins, and violence, and terror. – Carl Jung
The divine process of change manifests itself to our human understanding . . . as punishment, torment, death, and transfiguration. – Carl Jung
The experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego. – Carl Jung
Life calls not for perfection, but for completeness. – Carl Jung
What you resist persist. – Carl Jung
To become acquainted with oneself is a terrible shock. – Carl Jung
An understanding heart is everything in a teacher and cannot be esteemed highly enough. – Carl Jung
Shadow work is the path of the heart warrior. – Carl Jung
At present we educate people only up to the point where they can earn a living and marry; then education ceases altogether, as though a complete mental outfit had been acquired. … Vast numbers of men and women thus spend their entire lives in complete ignorance of the most important things. – Carl Jung
Nature seemed to me full of wonders, and I wanted to steep myself in them. Every stone, every plant, every single thing seemed alive and indescribably marvelous. I immersed myself in nature, crawled, as it were, into the very essence of nature and away from the whole human world. – Carl Jung
It is the individual’s task to differentiate himself from all the others and stand on his own feet. All collective identities . . . interfere with the fulfillment of this task. Such collective identities are crutches for the lame, shields for the timid, beds for the lazy, nurseries for the irresponsible… – Carl Jung
Perfection belongs to the Gods; the most we can hope for is excellence. – Carl Jung
The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological order, but psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions which are nothing other than psychic epidemics. At any moment several million human beings may be smitten with a new madness, and then we shall have another world war or devastating revolution. Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche. – Carl Jung
Remember that the only God man comes in contact with is his own God, called Spirit, Soul and Mind, or Consciousness, and these three are one. – Carl Jung
It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world color and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I can experience is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus, there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are . . . enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images. – Carl Jung
The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. – Carl Jung
To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is. – Carl Jung
Embrace your grief. For there, your soul will grow. – Carl Jung
Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain. – Carl Jung
The sad truth is that man’s real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites – day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been and always will be and if it were not so, existence would come to an end. – 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
Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you. – Carl Jung
The prerequisite for a good marriage … is the license to be unfaithful. – Carl Jung
I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud. – Carl Jung
To ask the right question is already half the solution of a problem. – Carl Jung
We are not what happened to us, we are what we wish to become. – Carl Jung
Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries. – Carl Jung
Every human life contains a potential, if that potential is not fulfilled, then that life was wasted. – Carl Jung
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn the literature of the whole world – all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls. – Carl Jung
I cannot love anyone if I hate myself. That is the reason why we feel so extremely uncomfortable in the presence of people who are noted for their special virtuousness, for they radiate an atmosphere of the torture they inflict on themselves. That is not a virtue but a vice. – Carl Jung
In each of us is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves. – 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 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, semi human, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, divine. – Carl Jung
There is no light without shadow, and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. – Carl Jung
The world will ask you who you are, and if you don’t know, the world will tell you. – Carl Jung
When we must deal with problems, we instinctively resist trying the way that leads through obscurity and darkness. We wish to hear only of unequivocal results, and completely forget that these results can only be brought about when we have ventured into and emerged again from the darkness. But to penetrate the darkness we must summon all the powers of enlightenment that consciousness can offer. – Carl Jung
It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course—for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him. – Carl Jung
In order to know the light, we must first experience the darkness. – Carl Jung
Only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the treasure hard to attain. He alone has a genuine claim to self-confidence, for he has faced the dark ground of his self and thereby has gained himself. This experience gives him faith and trust. – Carl Jung
The healthy man does not torture others. – Carl Jung
Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next. – Carl Jung
The brighter the light, the darker the shadow. – Carl Jung
People cannot stand too much Reality. – Carl Jung
Synchronicity reveals the meaningful connections between the subjective and objective world. – Carl Jung
Life really does begin at forty. Up until then, you are just doing research. – Carl Jung
Intuition is one of the four basic psychological functions along with thinking, feeling, and sensing. – Carl Jung
No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell. – Carl Jung
I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished. – Carl Jung
I am an orphan, alone: nevertheless, I am found everywhere. I am one but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains, I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons. – 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
It is high time that we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to preach the art of seeing. – Carl Jung
Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains. – Carl Jung
You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do. – Carl Jung
Wisdom accepts that all things have two sides – Carl Jung
Knowledge does not enrich us; it removes us more and more from the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth. – Carl Jung
The difference between a good life and a bad life is how well you walk through the fire – Carl Jung
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. – Carl Jung
Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books. – Carl Jung
Conflicts create the fire of affects and emotions; and like every fire it has two aspects: that of burning and that of giving light. – Carl Jung
The descent into the depths always seems to precede the ascent. – Carl Jung
Commendation heals; condemnation destroys. – Carl Jung
Conflict exists strictly as an opportunity to raise our consciousness. – Carl Jung
Nature does not deceive or conceal but reveals. – Carl Jung
To be normal is the ultimate aim of the unsuccessful. – Carl Jung
I believe that we have no real access to who we really are except in God. Only when we rest in God can we find the safety, the spaciousness, and the scary freedom to be who we are, all that we are, more than we are, and less than we are. – Carl Jung
Neurosis is an inner cleavage-the state of being at war with oneself. – Carl Jung
All true things must change and only that which changes remains true. – Carl Jung
Our unconscious is the key to our life’s pursuits. – Carl Jung
Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfill the way that is in you. – Carl Jung
I cannot define for you what God is. I can only say that my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern has at its disposal the greatest of all his energies for transformation and transfiguration of his natural being. Not only the meaning of his life but his renewal and his institutions depend on his conscious relationship with this pattern of his collective unconscious. – Carl Jung
Sometimes you have to do something unforgivable just to be able to go on living. – Carl Jung
The unconscious psyche believes in life after death – Carl Jung
Normality is a fine ideal for those who have no imagination. – Carl Jung
Every psychic advance of man arises from the suffering of the soul. – Carl Jung
Thunder is no longer the voice of an angry god… No river contains a spirit… no snake the embodiment of wisdom, no mountain cave the home of a great demon. No voices now speak to man from stones, plants and animals, nor does he speak to them thinking they can hear. His contact with nature has gone, and with it has gone the profound emotional energy that this symbolic connection supplied. – Carl Jung
Our western mind lacking all culture in this respect, has never yet devised a concept, not even a name for the union of opposites through the middle path, that most fundamental item of inward experience which could respectably be set against the Chinese concept of Tao. – Carl Jung
Who looks outside, dreams, who looks inside, awakes. – Carl Jung
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. – Carl Jung
Dawn is born at midnight. – Carl Jung
Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar’s gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart through the world. – Carl Jung
Be simple and always take the next step. You needn’t see it in advance, but you can look back at it afterwards. There is no ‘how’ of life, one just does it. – Carl Jung
Intuition is perception via the unconscious that brings forth ideas, images, new possibilities and ways out of blocked situations. – Carl Jung
