Quotes
57 Inspirational Carl Jung Quotes
Carl Jung or C.G Jung was a psychiatrist and psychotherapist from Switzerland who was the founder of analytical psychology. Jung is best remembered for developing some of the best known psychological concepts, such as extroverted and introverted personalities. Other major influences of Carl Jung consists of anthropology, religious studies, archaeology, philosophy, and literature.
Here are 57 Carl Jung quotes, grouped by theme:
Carl Jung quotes on self-knowledge and consciousness
1. “Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” – Carl Jung
2. “There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” – Carl Jung
3. “Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.” – Carl Jung
4. “Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.” – Carl Jung
5. “It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.” – Carl Jung
6. “The rational attitude which permits us to declare objective values as valid at all is not the work of the individual subject, but the product of human history.” – Carl Jung
7. “The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.” – Carl Jung
8. “To ask the right question is already half the solution of a problem.” – Carl Jung
9. “The capacity for directed thinking I call intellect; the capacity for passive or undirected thinking I call intellectual intuition.” – Carl Jung
10. “I have always been impressed by the fact that there are a surprising number of individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and an equal number who do use their minds, but in an amazingly stupid way.” – Carl Jung
11. “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to a better understanding of ourselves.” – Carl Jung
12. “We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.” – Carl Jung
13. “Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”- Carl Jung
14. “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
15. “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.”- Carl Jung
16. “The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.”- Carl Jung
17. “Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.”- Carl Jung
18. “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
19. “Faith, hope, love, and insight are the highest achievements of human effort. They are found-given-by experience.”- Carl Jung
Carl Jung quotes on acceptance and the shadow
20. “We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.” – Carl Jung
21. “A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.” – Carl Jung
22. “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
23. “Shame is a soul eating emotion.” – Carl Jung
24. “The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.” – Carl Jung
25. “A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.”- Carl Jung
26. “Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”- Carl Jung
27. “The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life.”- Carl Jung
28. “We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.”- Carl Jung
29. “Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next.”- Carl Jung
30. “No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”- Carl Jung
31. “Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.”- Carl Jung
32. “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 ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”- Carl Jung
33. “Nobody can fall so low unless he has a great depth.” – Carl Jung
34. “If such a thing can happen to a man, it challenges his best and highest on the other side; that is to say, this depth corresponds to a potential height, and the blackest darkness to a hidden light.”- Carl Jung
35. “In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.”- Carl Jung
36. “Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.”- Carl Jung
37. “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
Carl Jung quotes on dreams, imagination, and the psyche
38. “The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.” – Carl Jung
39. “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
40. “To me dreams are part of nature, which harbors no intention to deceive but expresses something as best it can.” – Carl Jung
41. “Creative powers can just as easily turn out to be destructive. It rests solely with the moral personality.” – Carl Jung
42. “Whether they apply themselves to good things or to bad. And if this is lacking, no teacher can supply it or take its place.” – Carl Jung
43. “That which compels us to create a substitute for ourselves is not the external lack of objects, but our incapacity to lovingly include a thing outside of ourselves.” – Carl Jung
44. “A dream that is not understood remains a mere occurrence; understood it becomes a living experience.” – Carl Jung
45. “When we consider the infinite variety of dreams, it is difficult to conceive that there could ever be a method or a technical procedure which would lead to an infallible result. It is, indeed, a good thing that no valid method exists for otherwise the meaning of the dream would be limited in advance and would lose precisely that virtue which makes dreams so valuable for therapeutic purposes – their ability to offer new points of view.” – Carl Jung
46. “I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.”- Carl Jung
Carl Jung quotes on individuality and becoming who you are
47. “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
48. “An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling. 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
49. “Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.” – Carl Jung
50. “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
51. “A special ability means a heavy expenditure of energy in a particular direction, with a consequent drain from some other side of life.” – Carl Jung
52. “If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely.” – Carl Jung
53. “I regret many follies which sprang from my obstinacy; but without that trait I would not have reached my goal.” – Carl Jung
54. “As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single individual who will experience it and carry it through. The change must indeed begin with an individual; it might be any one of us. Nobody can afford to look round and to wait for somebody else to do what he is loath to do himself.” – Carl Jung
55. “I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”- Carl Jung
56. “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
57. “The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.”- Carl Jung