Carl Jung famous quotes

So the lion is the law-breaker. Just as to the primitive man the lion is the lawbreaker, the great nuisance, dangerous to human beings and to animals, that breaks into the Kraal at night and fetches the bull out of the herd: he is the destructive instinct.
-- Carl Jung

#Night #Men #Animal

The only thing that really matters now is whether man can climb up to a higher moral level, to a higher plane of consciousness, in order to be equal to the superhuman powers which the fallen angels have played into his hands. But he can make no progress until he becomes very much better acquainted with his own nature.
-- Carl Jung

#Angel #Men #Hands

I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.
-- Carl Jung

#Inspirational #Life #Beautiful

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
-- Carl Jung

#Life #Beautiful #Dream

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
-- Carl Jung

#Life #Leadership #Thoughtful

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

#Reflection #Discovery #Profound

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

#Light #Darkness #Mind

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
-- Carl Jung

#Relationship #Leadership #Spiritual

Man cannot stand a meaningless life.
-- Carl Jung

#Men #Meaningless Life #Meaningless

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
-- Carl Jung

#Funny #Depression #Witty

Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.
-- Carl Jung

#Inspirational #Thinking #People

Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.
-- Carl Jung

#Life And Love #Inspiration #Adventure

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
-- Carl Jung

#Friendship #Relationship #Positive

Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see.
-- Carl Jung

#Eye #Reality #Synchronicity

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.
-- Carl Jung

#Life #Thoughtful #Shoes

There is no such thing as a pure extrovert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum.
-- Carl Jung

#Men #Asylums #Would Be

How difficult it is to reach anything approaching a moderate and relatively calm point of view in the midst of one's emotions.
-- Carl Jung

#Views #Emotion #Calm

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.
-- Carl Jung

#Drinking #Addiction #Funny Sarcastic

Whenever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator state, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units.
-- Carl Jung

#Fall #Justice #Police

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

#Love #Happiness #Being Happy

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.
-- Carl Jung

#Inspirational #Passion #Thoughtful

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

#Truth #Judgement #World

Whenever we touch nature we get clean. People who have got dirty through too much civilization take a walk in the woods, or a bath in the sea. Entering the unconscious, entering yourself through dreams, is touching nature from the inside and this is the same thing, things are put right again.
-- Carl Jung

#Dream #Dirty #Sea

One must be able to let things happen.
-- Carl Jung

#Able #Things Happen

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

#Love #Inspirational #Life

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

#Inspirational #Change #Family

I think it is better for all people to live on, to look forward to the next stage (after death), as if he had to spend centuries, then he lives properly... looking forward to the great adventure ahead, then he lives!
-- Carl Jung

#Adventure #Thinking #People

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

#Darkness #Enlightenment #Trying

I could not say I believe. I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God.
-- Carl Jung

#Believe #People #Religion

To confront a person with their own shadow is to show them their own light.
-- Carl Jung

#Light #Shadow #Shows

We don't really heal anything; we simply let it go.
-- Carl Jung

#Let It Go #Heal

To ask the right question is already half the solution of a problem.
-- Carl Jung

#Half #Problem #Solutions

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, semihuman, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, "divine."
-- Carl Jung

#Spiritual #Nature #Dark

Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.
-- Carl Jung

#Shadow #Intention #Individual

There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion
-- Carl Jung

#Inspiring #Inspiration #Emotional

What if I should discover that the poorest of the beggars and the most impudent of offenders are all within me; and that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I, myself, am the enemy who must be loved -- what then?
-- Carl Jung

#Kindness #Enemy #What If

Instinct is like Nature herself - prodigiously conservative, and yet transcending her own historical conditions in her acts of creation.
-- Carl Jung

#Historical #Conservative #Creation

Too much of the animal disfigures the civilized human being, too much culture makes a sick animal.
-- Carl Jung

#Animal #Sick #Too Much

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 Jung

#Inspirational #Children #Hints

The individual disposition is already a factor in childhood; it is innate, and not acquired in the course of a life.
-- Carl Jung

#Childhood #Individual #Disposition

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.
-- Carl Jung

#Thoughtful #Order #Secret Love

The educated man tries to repress the inferior one in himself, without realizing that by this he forces the latter to become revolutionary.
-- Carl Jung

#Men #Trying #Realizing

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

#Gratitude #Emotion #Wonder

Sometimes you have to do something unforgivable just to be able to go on living.
-- Carl Jung

#Goes On #Able #Sometimes

We are convinced that certain people have all the bad qualities we do not know in ourselves.
-- Carl Jung

#People #Quality #Certain

Nothing worse could happen to one than to be completely understood.
-- Carl Jung

#Understood

For better to come, good must stand aside.
-- Carl Jung

#Inspirational

Freedom stretches only as far as the limits of our consciousness
-- Carl Jung

#Limits #Consciousness

We should know what our convictions are, and stand for them. Upon one's own philosophy, conscious or unconscious, depends one's ultimate interpretation of facts. Therefore it is wise to be as clear as possible about one's subjective principles. As the man is, so will be his ultimate truth.
-- Carl Jung

#Wise #Truth #Philosophy

Whenever you hear anyone talking about a cultural or even about a human problem, you should never forget to inquire who the speaker really is. The more general the problem, the more the person will smuggle his or her own personal psychology into the account he or she gives of it.
-- Carl Jung

#Talking #Giving #Perspective

If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely.
-- Carl Jung

#Lonely #Men

Fortunately, in her kindness and patience, Nature has never put the fatal question as to the meaning of their lives into the mouths of most people. And where no one asks, no one needs to answer.
-- Carl Jung

#Kindness #People #Needs

One might expect, perhaps, that a man full of genius could pasture in the greatness of his own thoughts, and renounce the cheap approbation of the crowd which he despises; yet he succumbs to the more powerful impulse of the herd instinct. His searching and his finding, his call, belong to the herd.
-- Carl Jung

#Powerful #Men #Greatness

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. They then dwell in the house next door, and at any moment a flame may dart out and set fire to his own house. Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.
-- Carl Jung

#Giving Up #Passion #Men

All my writings may be considered tasks imposed from within, their source was a fateful compulsion. What I wrote were things that assailed me from within myself. I permitted the spirit that moved me to speak out.
-- Carl Jung

#Writing #Tasks #May

A criminal becomes a popular figure because he unburdens in no small degree the consciences of his fellow man, for now they know once more where evil is to be found.
-- Carl Jung

#Men #Self #Evil

A man likes to believe that he is the master of his soul. But as long as he is unable to control his moods and emotions, or to be conscious of the myriad secret ways in which unconscious factors insinuate themselves into his arrangements and decisions, he is certainly not his own master.
-- Carl Jung

#Believe #Men #Long

We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.
-- Carl Jung

#Life #Positive #Law Of Attraction

We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.
-- Carl Jung

#Change #Acceptance #Thoughtful

We are not what happened to us, we are what we wish to become.
-- Carl Jung

#Inspirational #Wish

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

#Leadership #Mean #Men

The unconscious wants to flow into consciousness in order to reach the light, but at the same time it continually thwarts itself, because it would rather remain unconscious. That is to say, God wants to become man, but not quite.
-- Carl Jung

#Men #Light #Order

If I accept the fact that a god is absolute and beyond all human experiences, he leaves me cold. I do not affect him, nor does he affect me. But if I know that a god is a powerful impulse in my soul, at once I must concern myself with him, for then he can become important
-- Carl Jung

#Faith #Powerful #Soul

You can take away a man's gods, but only to give him others in return.
-- Carl Jung

#Men #Giving #Return

The separation of psychology from the premises of biology is purely artificial, because the human psyche lives in indissoluble union with the body.
-- Carl Jung

#Psychology #Body #Unions

So often among so-called "primitives" one comes across spiritual personalities who immediately inspire respect, as though they were the fully matured products of an undisturbed fate.
-- Carl Jung

#Spiritual #Fate #Personality

Only a few individuals succeed in throwing off mythology in a time of a certain intellectual supremacy--the mass never frees itself.
-- Carl Jung

#Intellectual #Succeed #Individual

To become acquainted with oneself is a terrible shock.
-- Carl Jung

#Personality #Shock #Terrible

Good does not become better by being exaggerated, but worse; And a small evil becomes a big one through being disregarded and repressed.
-- Carl Jung

#Evil #Doe #Bigs

The only important thing is to follow nature. A tiger should be a good tiger; a tree, a good tree. So people should be people. But to know what people are, one must follow nature and go alone, admitting the importance of the unexpected. Still, nothing is possible without love. . . . For love puts one in a mood to risk everything, and not to withhold important elements.
-- Carl Jung

#Nature #People #Tree

The creative mind plays with the object it loves.
-- Carl Jung

#Love #Happiness #Passion

But, if you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself.
-- Carl Jung

#Inspirational #Creativity

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

#Heart #Evil #Wickedness

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.
-- Carl Jung

#Inspirational #Sports #Pain

Where love stops, power begins, and violence, and terror
-- Carl Jung

#Violence #Terror

The collective unconscious appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents. In fact the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious. We can see this most clearly if we look at the heavenly constellations, whose originally chaotic forms are organized through the projection of images. This explains the influence of the stars as asserted by astrologers. These influences are nothing but unconscious instrospective perceptions of the collective unconscious.
-- Carl Jung

#Stars #Real #Taken

It is sad but unfortunately true that man learns nothing from history.
-- Carl Jung

#Sad #Men

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

#Leadership #Uplifting #Relaxation

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

#Inspirational #Fighting #Self Confidence

It is only our deeds that reveal who we are.
-- Carl Jung

#Famous Inspirational #Deeds #Who We Are

No matter what the world thinks about religious experience, the one who has it possesses a great treasure, a thing that has become for him a source of life, meaning, and beauty, and that has given a new splendor to the world and to mankind.
-- Carl Jung

#Religious #Thinking #Psychology

Real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full.
-- Carl Jung

#Real #Feelings #Painful

No one can flatter himself that he is immune to the spirit of his own epoch, or even that he possesses a full understanding of it. Irrespective of our conscious convictions, each one of us, without exception, being a particle of the general mass, is somewhere attached to, colored by, or even undermined by the spirit which goes through the mass. Freedom stretches only as far as the limits of our consciousness.
-- Carl Jung

#Freedom #Understanding #Limits

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.
-- Carl Jung

#Creativity #Men #Imagination

Our world has become dehumanized. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature.
-- Carl Jung

#Men #Our World #Cosmos

You can expect no influence if you are not susceptible to influence.
-- Carl Jung

#Innovation #Influence

The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.
-- Carl Jung

#Suffering #Foundation #Mindfulness

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

#Love #Leadership #Fun

The psychiatrist knows only too well how each of us becomes the helpless but not pitiable victim of his own sentiments. Sentimentality is the superstructure erected upon brutality.
-- Carl Jung

#Brutality #Victim #Psychiatrist

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

#Inspirational #Loneliness #Being Alone

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

#Spiritual #People #Personality

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.
-- Carl Jung

#Inspirational #Uplifting #Stupidity

Called or not, God is always there.
-- Carl Jung

#God

Nature does not deceive or conceal, but reveals.
-- Carl Jung

#Doe #Deceiving

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

#Dark #Psychology #Shadow

But what will he do when he sees only too clearly why his patient is ill; when he sees that it arises from his having no love, but only sexuality; no faith, because he is afraid to grope in the dark; no hope, because he is disillusioned by the world and by life; and no understanding, because he has failed to read the meaning of his own existence?
-- Carl Jung

#Dark #Understanding #World

The greater the contrast, the greater the potential. Great energy only comes from a correspondingly great tension of opposites.
-- Carl Jung

#Opposites #Innovation #Energy

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

#Niece #Thoughtful #Tree

The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life.
-- Carl Jung

#Responsibility #Men #Painful

The difference between a good life and a bad life is how well you walk through the fire
-- Carl Jung

#Good Life #Fire #Differences