C.G. Jung: Quotes about life

“There's no coming to consciousness without pain.”

“The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.”

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

“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.”

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

“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. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.”

“Among all my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over thirty-five—there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost what the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.”

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

“The great problems of life — sexuality, of course, among others — are always related to the primordial images of the collective unconscious.”

“The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness.”

“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.”

“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.”

“For it all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”

“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.”

“Nobody, as long as he moves among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.”

“My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.”

“A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon.”

“Life is a battleground. It always has been, and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end.”

“Man cannot stand a meaningless life.”