Last Updated on September 6, 2024
If you’ve ever encountered the terms anima/animus, persona, or collective unconscious, then perhaps you’re familiar with the works of Carl Jung. He is best known for founding analytical psychology. He also believes in individuation: which is the coming together of a person’s psychological, interpersonal, and cultural experiences.
While the effectiveness of his theories and practices are still debatable, there is some evidence that suggests its effectiveness in terms of helping people understand behaviors and habits.
Who is Carl Jung?
Born as Karl Gustav Jung on July 26, 1875 in Kesswil, in the Swiss canton of Thurgau, he was the first child of Paul Achilles Jung and Emilie Preiswerk. Jung was mostly an introverted child. His mother, who usually suffered from ‘eccentricity and depression’, affected his view on life and women.
He stopped going to school because of an incident that caused him to suffer from neurosis (diagnosed as depressive or anxiety disorder today). However, realizing their family’s poverty, he pored over Latin grammar and eventually went back to school.
By 1900, he crossed paths with Sigmund Freud thanks to his dissertation on ‘the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena’. By the time he started a private practice in Küsnacht, he and Freud would’ve had close friendship and correspondence. That collaboration would completely end by 1912, after Jung published Psychology of the Unconscious, contradicting many of Freud’s theories.
The Jungian Archetypes and Analytical Psychology
Jungian archetypes suggest that people inherit certain unconscious patterns and behaviors that influence our personalities. Four of the major archetypes include: the anima/animus, the shadow, the persona, and the self. Getting in touch with all four archetypes would lead to a greater understanding of one’s self, or self-actualization (similar to Maslow’s concept).
Analytical psychology on the other hand, focuses on a person’s past and symbolic experiences. Those who undergo Jungian therapy for instance, may experience methods such as dream journaling or self-expression through art. Jung believed that our early life experiences help to shape our behaviors. But we also have collective experiences stored in our subconscious. When these two are imbalanced, we may start to see problems in our relationships and in ourselves.
The aim of analytical psychology is individuation, or wholeness. Only when you are aware of your conscious and unconscious can you fully develop into who you are meant to become.
You don’t need to be a psychologist to understand these Carl Jung quotes; you just need an open mind and a willingness to understand the inner you.
Enlightening Carl Jung Quotes
- “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” – Carl Jung
- “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” – Carl Jung
- “Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” – Carl Jung
- “I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.” – Carl Jung
- “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” – Carl Jung
- “You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.” – Carl Jung
- “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
- “Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.” – Carl Jung
- “The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.” – Carl Jung
- “Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.” – Carl Jung
- “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
- “The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” – Carl Jung
- “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.” – Carl Jung
- “The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.” – Carl Jung
- “There’s no coming to consciousness without pain.” – Carl Jung
- “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” – Carl Jung
- “Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.” – Carl Jung
- “In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.” – Carl Jung
- “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.” – Carl Jung
- “No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.” – Carl Jung
- “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.” – Carl Jung
- “Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event.” – Carl Jung
- “Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.” – Carl Jung
- “Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.” – Carl Jung
- “We cannot change anything unless we accept it.” – Carl Jung
- “The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents.” – Carl Jung
- “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
- “Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.” – Carl Jung
- “The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.” – Carl Jung
- “Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.” – Carl Jung
- “There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. 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.” – Carl Jung
- “Shame is a soul eating emotion.” – Carl Jung
- “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
- “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
- “The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.” – Carl Jung
- “What you resist, persists.” – Carl Jung
- “The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.” – Carl Jung
- “About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times.” – Carl Jung
- “Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.” – Carl Jung
- “Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries.” – Carl Jung
- “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
- “The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.” – Carl Jung
- “Nights through dreams tell the myths forgotten by the day.” – Carl Jung
- “It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going.” – Carl Jung
- “Every human life contains a potential, if that potential is not fulfilled, then that life was wasted…” – Carl Jung
- “We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.” – Carl Jung
- “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.” – Carl Jung
- “I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole.” – Carl Jung
- “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
- “Deep down, below the surface of the average man’s conscience, he hears a voice whispering, ‘There is something not right,’ no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or moral code.” – Carl Jung
- “There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.” – Carl Jung
- “Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” – Carl Jung
- “Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.” – Carl Jung
- “We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.” – Carl Jung
- “Words are animals, alive with a will of their own.” – Carl Jung
- “Sometimes you have to do something unforgivable just to be able to go on living.” – Carl Jung
- “Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next.” – Carl Jung
- “Every Mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother and every mother extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter.” – Carl Jung
- “When an inner situation is not made conscious it appears outside as fate.” – Carl Jung
- “Without this playing with fantasy, no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.” – Carl Jung
- “Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.” – Carl Jung
- “The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual becomes.” – Carl Jung
- “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
- “Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.” – Carl Jung
- “My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.” – Carl Jung
- “The true leader is always led.” – Carl Jung
- “In each of us there is another whom we do not know.” – Carl Jung
- “Nobody, as long as he moves among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.” – Carl Jung
- “If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.” – Carl Jung
- “We are born at a given moment, in a given place, and like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season in which we are born.” – Carl Jung
