Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) was a Swiss psychologist. He was the founder of analytical psychology and established many significant methods of psychiatric therapy.
Born in Kesswil, Switzerland, Jung studied medicine at the universities of Basle and Zürich. He made his name as a psychiatrist with his physiological and psychological studies of schizophrenia. He initially collaborated with Sigmund Freud on psychoanalytic theories of personality but split-up later because of Freud’s obsession with sexuality as the determinant of personality.
Jung’s foremost interest was the unconscious backdrop of conscious life; he assigned much meaning to dreams. He originated the concept of an introvert and extrovert personality and the four psychological functions—sensation, intuition, thinking, and feeling.
Jung is not regarded as a systematic philosopher, but his religious and spiritual vision—in particular, his interest in oriental religion—have had their influence. In his most important work, The Psychology of the Unconscious (1912,) he described his belief of a collective unconscious, which he synthesized with a theory of archetypes for studying the history and psychology of religion.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Carl Gustav Jung
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
—Carl Gustav Jung
A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Passion
Called or not called, God is present.
—Carl Gustav 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 Gustav Jung
Topics: Miscellaneous, Perspective, Meaning
No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps. A nation has no honor, it has no word to keep
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Government
It is the individual’s task to differentiate himself from all the others and stand on his own feet. All collective identities… interfere with the fulfillment of this task. Such collective identities are crutches for the lame, shields for the timid, beds for the lazy, nurseries for the irresponsible….
—Carl Gustav Jung
Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Solitude
So they speak soothingly about progress and the greatest possible happiness, forgetting that happiness is itself poisoned if the measure of suffering has not been fulfilled.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Happiness
Science is not … a perfect instrument, but it is a superb and invaluable tool that works harm only when taken as an end in itself.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Science
The wise man who is not heeded is counted a fool, and the fool who proclaims the general folly first and loudest passes for a prophet and Fuhrer, and sometimes it is luckily the other way round as well, or else mankind would long since have perished of stupidity.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Leadership, Leaders
The pendulum of the mind alternates between
sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
—Carl Gustav Jung
All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Imagination
When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Fate
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 Gustav Jung
Topics: Happiness, Sadness
Where love rules, there is no will to power; where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
—Carl Gustav Jung
I want to be freed neither from human beings, nor from myself, nor from nature; for all these appear to me the greatest of miracles.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Nature
Nothing is more repulsive than a furtively prurient spirituality; it is just as unsavory as gross sensuality.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Spirit, Spirituality
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Light
Nobody, as long as he moves among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.
—Carl Gustav Jung
It is only our deeds that reveal who we are.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Action
Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Knowledge
Far from being a material world, this is a psychic world, which allows us to make only indirect and hypothetical inferences about the real nature of matter. The psychic, alone has immediate reality, and this includes all forms of the psychic, even
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Reality
The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Youth
I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.
—Carl Gustav Jung
In the second half of life the necessity is imposed of recognizing no longer the validity of our former ideals but of their contraries. Of perceiving the error in what was previously our conviction, of sensing the untruth in what was our truth, and of weighing the degree of opposition, and even of hostility, in what we took to be love.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Age
An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Defects, Ego, Egotism
Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Individuality
The great decisions of human life usually have far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness. The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no universal recipe for living. Each of us carries his own life-form within him—an irrational form which no other can outbid.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: How to Live, Decisions, Individuality
Only that which changes remains true.
—Carl Gustav Jung
This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once: scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Audiences
The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Conflict
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.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Belief
If you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself.
—Carl Gustav Jung
If I accept the fact that a god is absolute and beyond all human experiences, he leaves me cold. I do not affect him, nor does he affect me. But if I know that a god is a powerful impulse in my soul, at once I must concern myself with him, for then he can become important
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Faith
There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Emotions
In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Disorder
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 of which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything more.
—Carl Gustav Jung
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Cooperation, Personality, Help, Romance, Meeting
Creative powers can just as easily turn out to be destructive. It rests solely with the moral personality whether they apply themselves to good things or to bad. And if this is lacking, no teacher can supply it or take its place.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Creativity
There is no coming to consciousness without pain.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Difficulties, Adversity, Pain
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau French Philosopher
Henri Frederic Amiel Swiss Philosopher, Writer
Karl Barth Swiss Protestant Theologian
Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi Swiss Educator
Abraham Maslow American Psychologist
Carl Rogers American Psychologist
Hermann Hesse Swiss Novelist, Poet
Alfred Adler Austrian Psychiatrist
Albert Einstein German-born Theoretical Physicist
Erich Fromm German Social Philosopher