Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, an influential thinker and the founder of analytical psychology. Although he was a theoretical psychologist and a practicing clinician, he spent his life’s work on exploring other areas, such as Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, sociology, literature and the arts. His thoughts definitely deserve to be quoted and meditated upon. In this article, we’ve collected the most mind-bending Carl Jung quotes that can help you look at life from a different angle. When reading Carl Jung quotes you will see how amazingly well he combines logical thinking along with a grain of spirituality and the subconscious realms. We hope you will get inspired by our collection of Carl Jung quotes as much as we are!
So, here they are 50 mind-bended Carl Jung quotes!
50 Carl Jung Quotes
#1
“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
#2
“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
– Carl Jung
#3
“Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.”
– Carl Jung
#4
“I am not what happens to me, I am what I choose to become.”
– Carl Jung
#5
“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
#6
“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”
– Carl Jung
#7
“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people.”
– Carl Jung
#8
“The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents.”
– Carl Jung
#9
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
– Carl Jung
#10
“Every human life contains a potential, if that potential is not fulfilled, then that life was wasted.”
– Carl Jung
#11
“Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you.
Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life…If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature…Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim.
Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.”
– Carl Jung
#12
“Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic is alcohol, morphine or idealism.”
– Carl Jung
#13
“I don’t aspire to be a good man. I aspire to be a whole man.”
– Carl Jung
#14
“Shame is a soul-eating emotion.”
– Carl Jung
#15
“Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.”
– Carl Jung
#16
“You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.”
– Carl Jung
#17
“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
#18
“Sometimes you have to do something unforgivable just to be able to go on living.”
– Carl Jung
#19
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
– Carl Jung
#20
“The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.”
– Carl Jung
#21
“Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next.”
– Carl Jung
#22
“It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how things are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”
– Carl Jung
#23
“We cannot change anything unless we accept it.”
– Carl Jung
#24
“…anyone who attempts to do both, to adjust to his group and at the same time pursue his individual goal, becomes neurotic.”
– Carl Jung
#25
“The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change.”
– Carl Jung
#26
“What you resist, persists.”
– Carl Jung
#27
“For better to come, good must stand aside.”
– Carl Jung
#28
“If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.”
– Carl Jung
#29
“Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.”
– Carl Jung
#30
“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
#31
“In each of us, there is another whom we do not know.”
– Carl Jung
#32
“The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.”
– Carl Jung
#33
“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
#34
“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
#35
“If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.”
– Carl Jung
#36
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
– Carl Jung
#37
“The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends.”
– Carl Jung
#38
“Faith, hope, love, and insight are the highest achievements of human effort. They are found-given-by experience.”
– Carl Jung
#39
“Christians often ask why God does not speak to them, as he is believed to have done in former days. When I hear such questions, it always makes me think of the rabbi who asked how it could be that God often showed himself to people in the olden days whereas nowadays nobody ever sees him. The rabbi replied: “Nowadays there is no longer anybody who can bow low enough.”
This answer hits the nail on the head. We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions. The Buddhist discards the world of unconscious fantasies as useless illusions; the Christian puts his Church and his Bible between himself and his unconscious, and the rational intellectual does not yet know that his consciousness is not his total psyche.”
– Carl Jung
#40
“In all chaos, there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.”
– Carl Jung
#41
“Nobody can fall so low unless he has great depth.”
– Carl Jung
#42
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
#43
“Space flights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself because it is easier to go to Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one’s own being.”
– Carl Jung
#44
“Every individual needs revolution, inner division, overthrow of the existing order, and renewal, but not by forcing them upon his neighbors under the hypocritical cloak of Christian love or the sense of social responsibility or any of the other beautiful euphemisms for unconscious urges to personal power.”
– Carl Jung
#45
“Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event.”
– Carl Jung
#46
“Explore daily the will of God.”
– Carl Jung
#47
“We have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.”
– Carl Jung
#48
“Real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full.”
– Carl Jung
#49
“One of the main functions of organized religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God.”
– Carl Jung
#50
“Freedom of will is the ability to do gladly that which I must do.”
– Carl Jung