Carl Jung (26 July 1875 to 6 June 1961) founded the field of analytical psychology. He is famous for his work on the collective unconsciousness, the idea that we are all introverts or extroverts, and the theory of personality types defining humanity.
The collective unconscious is the deep layer of your mind that you inherit from your ancestors – your instincts. Most of your thoughts come from your experiences and how others treat you. But like any other animal, you have inherited a set of automatic responses to the world formed from your shared ancestral experiences. Most people have a fear of snakes regardless of ever having come across one.
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
Carl Gustav Jung
Today we are familiar with the idea that some people are happiest when alone (introverts), and others need the company of others (extroverts). Carl Jung introduced the concept that we are all born with a natural personality type and are either extroverted or introverted. These ideas changed the way we understand ourselves and others.
Carl Jung was a pioneer in understanding the workings of the mind. He laid the foundation for many of our approaches to self-improvement and empowerment through positive thinking.
From Carl Jung, you can learn how to harness the creative power of the mind. By understanding yourself and others, you can promote change and growth at work and home. Personality testing based on Carl Jung’s work is part of standard recruitment processes and team building. All the techniques used today in management theory developed from Carl Jung’s observations on how our unconscious mind influences our behavior.
Carl Jung Quotes
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Carl Gustav Jung
Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.
Carl Jung
Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
C.G. Jung
The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.
Carl Jung
I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.
Carl Gustav Jung
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
Carl Jung
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
C.G. 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
You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.
Carl Gustav Jung
In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.
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 Gustav 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
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
Carl Gustav Jung
All fanaticism is repressed doubt.
Carl Jung
The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
Carl Gustav 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
Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.
Carl Gustav Jung
Everyone you meet knows something you don’t know but need to know. Learn from them.
Carl Jung
As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.”
Carl Gustav 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 privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.
Carl Gustav 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
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.
Carl Gustav Jung
Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see.
Carl Jung
The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.
C.G. Jung
The most important question anyone can ask is: What myth am I living?
Carl Jung
There’s no coming to consciousness without pain.
Carl Gustav Jung
That which we do not confront in ourselves we will meet as fate.
Carl Jung
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
Carl Gustav 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
Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
Carl Gustav Jung
Be grateful for your difficulties and challenges, for they hold blessings. In fact… Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health personal growth, individuation and self-actualisation.
Carl Jung
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
Carl Jung
If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely.
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 G. 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
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.
Carl Gustav Jung
We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.
Carl Jung
Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event.
Carl Gustav 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
No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.
Carl Jung
The descent into the depths always seems to precede the ascent.
Carl Jung
Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.
Carl Gustav Jung
Real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full.
Carl Jung
We cannot change anything unless we accept it.
Carl Gustav Jung
I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success of money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears.
Carl Jung
Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.
C.G. Jung
You always become the thing you fight the most.
Carl Jung
The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents.
Carl Gustav Jung
To ask the right question is already half the solution of a problem.
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.
C.G. 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
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 Gustav Jung
It is only our deeds that reveal who we are.
Carl Jung
The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.
Carl Gustav Jung
The artist’s life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him [or her]-on the one hand, the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life, and on the other a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire … There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire.
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 Gustav 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
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 Gustav Jung
Intuition is one of the four basic psychological functions along with thinking, feeling,and sensing.
Carl Jung
Shame is a soul eating emotion.
Carl Gustav Jung
Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.
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 Gustav Jung
In every adult there lurks a child— an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education. That is the part of the personality which wants to develop and become whole.
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.
C.G. Jung
Normality is a fine ideal for those who have no imagination.
Carl Jung
The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.
Carl Gustav Jung
Conflict exists strictly as an opportunity to raise our consciousness.
Carl Jung
What you resist, persists
C.G. 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
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
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
About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times.
Carl Gustav Jung
God enters through the wound.
Carl Jung
Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.
C.G. Jung
When goals go, meaning goes. When meaning goes, purpose goes. When purpose goes, life goes dead on our hands.
Carl Jung
Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries.
Carl Gustav Jung
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.
Carl Jung
By studying Carl Jung, you can examine yourself and get in touch with your creative mind. Your unconscious speaks to you in dreams and symbols, and by learning to understand this language consciously, you can develop new ideas and approaches to problems at work and home. The following Carl Jung quotes give glimpses of how Carl Jung viewed life.
