This page lists some of the all-time best Carl Jung quotes. Enjoy!
Page Contents:
- Conscious & Unconscious Quotes
- Ego & Self Quotes
- Introversion & Intuition Quotes
- Psychology & Psychic Danger Quotes
- Meaning & More Quotes
50+ 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
“The psyche has two important conditions: one is the environmental influence, and the other is the given fact of the psyche as it is born. The psyche is by no means a ‘tabula rasa’ (clean slate). We are a definite mixture and combination of genes, and they are there from the very first moment of our life, and they give a definite character.” — 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 say anymore or undervalue the unconscious by assuming it is nothing but a discarded remnant of consciousness. It is a factor in its own dignity, and a very important factor because it can create the most horrible disturbances … (The unconscious) can determine its human behavior to a very considerable degree.” — Carl Jung
“The unconscious was … a sort of basis of consciousness of a creative nature. Namely, capable of autonomous acts, autonomous intrusions into consciousness. In other words, I took the existence of the unconscious for a real fact, for a real autonomous factor capable of independent action.” — Carl Jung
“The unconscious is real. It is an entity. It works by itself. It is autonomous.” — Carl Jung
“The unconscious clearly produces things which are historical and not personal.” — Carl Jung
“There is an impersonal stratum in our psyche.” — Carl Jung
“Our age has shifted all emphasis to the here and now, and thus brought about a daemonization of man and his world. The phenomenon of dictators and all the misery they have wrought springs from the fact that man has been robbed of transcendence by the shortsightedness of the super-intellectuals. Like them, he 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
“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
“A dream is the manifestation of the unconscious side.” — Carl Jung
“There is a peculiar fact that the archetype of the ‘anima’ plays a very great role in Western literature.” — Carl Jung
“There are individuals who have amazing knowledge of themselves, of the things that go on in themselves. But even those people wouldn’t be capable of knowing what is going on in their unconscious. For instance, they are not conscious of the fact that while they live a conscious life, all the time a myth is played in the unconscious. A myth that extends over centuries. Namely, archetypal ideas, stream of archetypal ideas that goes on through one individual through the centuries!” — Carl Jung
“Archetypes are instinctual images … They are always there, and they produce certain processes in the unconscious. One could best compare with myths. That’s the origin of mythology. Mythology is a pronouncing of a series of images that formulate the life of archetypes. And so, the statements of every religion, and of many poets, and so on, are statements about the inner mythological process, which is a necessity because man is not complete if he is not conscious of that aspect of things.” — Carl Jung
“Man has always lived in the myth. And, we think we are able to be born today and to live in no myth, without history. That is a disease. That’s absolutely abnormal. Because man is not born every day. He is once born in a specific historical setting, with specific historical qualities, and therefore he is only complete when he has a relation to these things.” — 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
“The ‘persona’ is partially the result of the demands society has—and on the other side, it is a compromise with what one likes to be or as one likes to appear.” — Carl Jung
“That also is fiction of himself—his idea about himself is more or less portrayed or represented. So, the persona is a certain complicated system of behavior which is partially dictated by society and partially dictated by (one’s) expectations or wishes.” — Carl Jung
“The performance of the persona is quite all right, as long as you know that you are not identical with the way in which you appear.” — Carl Jung
Carl Jung Quotes on Introversion & Intuition
“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
“My whole scheme of typology is merely a sort of orientation.” — Carl Jung
“(Psychological) type is nothing static. It changes in the course of life. I most certainly was characterized by thinking—I always thought, from early childhood on. I had a great deal of intuition too. And, I had a definite difficulty with feeling. My relation to reality was not particularly brilliant—I was often at variance with the reality of things.” — 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
“The introverted thinker is compensated by extroverted feeling—inferior, archaic extroverted feeling. So, an introverted thinker may be very crude in his feeling life.” — Carl Jung
“Intuition is a perception by ways or means of the unconscious.” — 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.” — Carl Jung
“Intuitive types very often do not perceive by their eyes or by their ears. They perceive by intuition.” — 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
“If or when the introverted-intuitive would speak what he really perceives, then practically nobody would understand him. He would be misunderstood.” — 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.” — Carl Jung
Carl Jung Quotes on Psychology & Psychic Danger
“You are far ahead in America with technological things, but in psychological matters and such things you are 50 years back!” — Carl Jung
“A real understanding of the psyche must consist in the elucidation of the history of the human race.” — Carl Jung
“To understand human psychology, it is absolutely necessary that you study man in his social and general environments.” — Carl Jung
“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. Nobody would give credit to the idea that the psychical processes of the ordinary man have any importance whatever.” — 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
“Nobody can deny that without the psyche there would be no world at all, and still less a human world. Virtually everything depends on the human psyche and its functions. It should be worthy of all the attention we can give it, especially today, when 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 my conviction that the investigation of the psyche is the science of the future. Psychology is the youngest of the sciences and is only at the beginning of its development. It is, however, the science we need most. Indeed, 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 … It is therefore in the highest degree desirable that a knowledge of psychology should spread so that men can understand the source of the supreme dangers that threaten them … It is my hope…to throw light on this fundamental problem for mankind.” — 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
Interviewer: “Do you remember the occasion when you first felt consciousness of your own individual self?” Jung: “That was in my eleventh year. I suddenly, on my way to school, stepped out of a mist. It was just as if I had been walking in a mist, and I stepped out of it, and I knew, ‘I am. I am what I am.’ And then I thought, ‘But what have I been before?’ And then I found that I had been in a mist, not knowing to differentiate myself from things. I was just one thing among many things … As far as I can remember, nothing had happened before that would explain this sudden coming to consciousness.” — 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
“Man is not complete when he lives in a world of the statistical truth. He must live in a world of his biological truth … It is the expression of what he really is, as what he feels himself.” — Carl Jung
“When you think in a certain way, you may feel considerably better. If you think along the lines of nature, then you think properly.” — 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
You May Also Enjoy:
- Browse all Quote Posts
