This is a curated selection of Carl Jung quotes (personally curated by me on my own lifelong learning journey). This page is intended as a learning resource for educational purposes and only meant to offer an overview/introduction. Short quotes aren’t a substitute for source material, so if this page sparks your interest, explore more deeply by checking out Carl Jung’s books (Amazon).
Page Contents:
- Conscious & Unconscious Quotes
- Ego & Self Quotes
- Introversion & Intuition Quotes
- Psychology & Psychic Danger Quotes
- Meaning & More Quotes
25 Carl Jung Quotes on the Ego, Self, Unconscious, & More
Carl Jung Quotes on the Conscious & Unconscious
“Any amount of unconscious things occur in my conscious condition. I’m never wholly conscious of myself.” — Carl Jung
“We depend largely upon our history. We are shaped through education, through the influence of the parents, which are by no means always personal. They were prejudiced, or they were influenced, by historical ideas … and that is a most decisive factor in psychology.” — Carl Jung
“The whole of philosophy in our days has not yet recognized this fact: that we have a counter-actor in our unconscious. That in our psyche there are two consciousnesses: there’s one factor, and there’s another factor, equally important, that is the unconscious that can interfere with consciousness at any time it pleases … This is very uncomfortable because I think I am the only master in my house, but I must admit that there is another—somebody in that house that can play tricks.” — Carl Jung
“One doesn’t make projections, one finds them. They are already there because the unconscious is here not conscious (for me), but there is conscious in my brother. I see the beam in my eye as a splinter in my brother’s eye. And that is right there because I’m unconscious of the beam in my eye.” — Carl Jung
“(Man) has fallen a victim to unconsciousness. But man’s task is the exact opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.” — Carl Jung
Carl Jung Quotes on the Ego & Self
“When I say ‘self’, then you must not think of ‘I, myself’ because that is only your empirical self, and that is covered by the term ‘ego’. But, when it is a matter of the self, then it is a matter of a personality that is more complete than the ego because the ego only consists of what you are conscious of—what you know to be your self.” — Carl Jung
“The ‘self’ is merely a term that designates the whole personality because the whole personality of man is indescribable. His consciousness can be described; his unconscious cannot be described because the unconscious is always unconscious. And, it is really unconscious, one really does not know it. And so, we don’t know our unconscious personality. We have hints, we have certain ideas, but we don’t know it really. Nobody can say where man ends. That is the beauty of it. It’s very interesting. The unconscious of man can reach God knows where—there we are going to make discoveries.” — Carl Jung
“The self is, on the one side, the ego; on the other side, the unconscious personality which everybody is in the possession of—very often it’s just the other way around that the unconscious is in possession of consciousness.” — Carl Jung
“The wholeness which I’ve called the ‘self’ … I am not whole in my ego. My ego is a fragment of my personality.” — Carl Jung
“The ‘ego’ is supposed to be the representative of the real person.” — Carl Jung
Carl Jung Quotes on Introversion & Intuition
“You are far ahead in America with technological things, but in psychological matters and such things you are 50 years back! … The world in general, particularly America, is extraverted like hell. The introvert has no place because he doesn’t know that he beholds the world from within, and that gives him dignity, and that gives him certainty, because it is nowadays particularly that the world hangs on a thin thread, and that is the psyche of man.” — Carl Jung
“There is no such thing as a pure extravert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum. Those are only terms to designate a certain penchant, a certain tendency—for instance, the tendency to be more influenced by environmental influences or more influenced by the subjective factor.” — Carl Jung
“Intuition doesn’t look at the things as they are. That is prison. That is anathema to the intuition. It looks ever so shortly at the things as they are, and makes off into an unconscious process, at the end of which we have seen something nobody else would have seen … Intuition is a perception by ways or means of the unconscious.” — Carl Jung
“One of the most difficult types is the intuitive-introvert … He has intuitions as to the subjective factor, namely, the inner world. And of course that is now very difficult to understand because what he sees are most uncommon things. And he doesn’t like to talk of them if he’s not a fool because he would spoil his whole game by telling what he sees because people won’t understand it.” — Carl Jung
“The introverted-intuitive has in a way a very difficult life, although one of the most interesting lives … The things that are interesting to them or are vital to them, are utterly strange to the ordinary individual … If or when the introverted-intuitive would speak what he really perceives, then practically nobody would understand him. He would be misunderstood.” — Carl Jung
Carl Jung Quotes on Psychology & Psychic Danger
“One thing is sure: a great change of our psychological attitude is imminent. That is certain. Because we need more psychology. We need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself. He is the great danger, and we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man, far too little. His psyche should be studied, because we are the origin of all coming evil.” — Carl Jung
“Nowadays we are not threatened by elementary catastrophes. There is no such thing as an H-bomb. That is all man’s doing. We are the great danger! Psyche is the great danger! What if something goes wrong with the psyche? It is demonstrated to us in our days—what the power of the psyche is, of man. How important it is to know something about it, but we know nothing about it.” — Carl Jung
“The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological order, but psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions which are nothing other than psychic epidemics. At any moment several millions of human beings may be smitten with a new madness, and then we shall have another world war or devastating revolution. Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche.” — Carl Jung
“Everyone admits that the weal or woe of the future will be decided neither by the threat of wild animals, nor by natural catastrophes, nor by the danger of world-wide epidemics, but simply and solely by the psychic changes in man. It needs only an almost imperceptible disturbance of equilibrium in a few of our rulers’ heads to plunge the world into blood, fire, and radioactivity.” — Carl Jung
“It is becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer, but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes. The supreme danger which threatens individuals as well as whole nations is a psychic danger. Reason has proved itself completely powerless, precisely because its arguments have an effect only on the conscious mind and not on the unconscious. The greatest danger of all comes from the masses, in whom the effects of the unconscious pile up cumulatively and the reasonableness of the conscious mind is stifled.” — Carl Jung
Carl Jung Quotes on Meaning & More
(On individuation) “Well, you know, that’s something quite simple. Take an acorn, put it in the ground, it grows and becomes an oak. You see, that is man. Man develops from an egg, and develops into the whole man, and that is the law that is in him.” — Carl Jung
“When I think of my patients, they all seek their own existence and to assure their existence against that complete atomization into nothingness or into meaninglessness. Man cannot stand a meaningless life.” — Carl Jung
“Every disease has a psychological accompaniment.” — Carl Jung
“The word ‘belief’ is a difficult thing for me. I don’t ‘believe’. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it, I don’t need to believe it. I don’t allow myself, for instance, to believe a thing just for the sake of believing it.” — Carl Jung
Interviewer: “Do you now believe in God?” Jung: “Now? Difficult to answer. I know. I don’t need to believe. I know.” — Carl Jung
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