Carl Jung Life Quotations

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

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

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life - that is to say, over 35 - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.

The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.

Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

In the child, consciousness rises out of the depths of unconscious psychic life, at first like separate islands, which gradually unite to form a 'continent,' a continuous landmass of consciousness. Progressive mental development means, in effect, extension of consciousness.

We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learnt to bear its ills without being overcome by them.

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life's morning.

Music is one of the highest art forms there is. It can define a life, change a life, or even safe a life, in just three short minutes.

Life is not meant to be an open-book test.

Where there is life, there is hope.

Explaining that I'm faced with a choice between being with the love of my life, or saving four lives that were never meant to end.

But we must not forget that only a very few people are artists in life; that the art of life is the most distinguished and rarest of all the arts.

Wo die Liebe herrscht, da gibt es keinen machtwillen, und wo die macht den vorrang hat, da fehlt die Liebe. Das eine ist der Schatten des andern. Translation: Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Life is a luminous pause between two mysteries that are yet one.

The answer to human life is not to be found within the limits of human life.

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

The difference between a good life and a bad life is how well you walk through the fire

Man cannot stand a meaningless life.

We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.

Archetypes resemble the beds of rivers: dried up because the water has deserted them, though it may return at any time. An archetype is something like an old watercourse along which the water of life flowed for a time, digging a deep channel for itself. The longer it flowed the deeper the channel, and the more likely it is that sooner or later the water will return.

Meaninglessnes s inhibits fullness of life and is therefore the equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable--perh aps everything.

But the meaning of life is not . . . explained by one's business life, nor is the deep desire of the human heart answered by a bank account.

An old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as the young man who is unable to embrace it.

Moreover, my ancestors' souls are sustained by the atmosphere of the house, since I answer for them the questions that their lives once left behind. I carve out rough answers as best I can. I have even drawn them on the walls. It is as if a silent, greater family, stretching down the centuries, were peopling the house.

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

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

Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.

As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single individual who will experience it and carry it through. The change must indeed begin with an individual; it might be any one of us. Nobody can afford to look round and to wait for somebody else to do what he is loath to do himself.

You must live life in such a spirit that you make in every moment the best of possibilities.

The need for mythic statements is satisfied when we frame a view of the world which adequately explains the meaning of human existence in the cosmos, a view which springs from our psychic wholeness, from the co-operation between conscious and unconscious. Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable - perhaps everything.

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.

The afternoon of a human life must have a significance of its own, and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life's morning.

I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it.

Life is something that has to be lived and not talked about.

Life is crazy and meaningful at once.

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of awareness of darkness... as the contrast between what we have and how it could be worse is vital to appreciate anything, including our life, and so be happy and grateful

The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life.

There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the forms of images filled with content, but at first only as forms without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action.