Carl Gustav Jung Quotes

“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 of meaning in the darkness of mere being.”

“Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.”

“Every human life contains a potential, if that potential is not fulfilled, then that life was wasted.”

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”

“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”

“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.”

“I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.”

“If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.”

“If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.”

“In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.”

“In each of us there is another whom we do not know.”

“It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.”

“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”

“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.”

“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.”

“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

“One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games and it cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive selves.”

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

“Shame is a soul-eating emotion.”

“Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.”

“Sometimes you have to do something unforgivable just to be able to go on living.”

“The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual.”

“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.”

“The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.”

“The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.”

“The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.”

“The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of the parents.”

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