Daily Inspiration Quote by Carl Jung

Pride is Jung’s polite word for the ego’s favorite magic trick: turning self-protection into self-knowledge. The line lands because it treats self-deception not as a rare moral failure but as a steady operating system. “Ever deceiving” makes it habitual; pride isn’t an occasional flare-up, it’s the lens we forget we’re wearing. Jung’s psychoanalytic wager is that we don’t merely lie to others. We curate ourselves for ourselves.

Then comes the quiet ambush: “deep down below the surface of the average conscience.” He’s not talking about saints or patients on the couch; he’s talking about the baseline citizen, the person with a passable moral self-image. That phrase “average conscience” is doing work. It hints that conscience itself is often a social mask, a set of respectable beliefs that can coexist with blind spots. Beneath it sits the “still, small voice,” a biblical echo (Elijah hearing God not in spectacle but in a whisper). Jung borrows that register to frame the unconscious as something with authority, not merely instinct.

“Something is out of tune” is the masterstroke: not sin, not guilt, not a diagnosable symptom. Aesthetic language instead of legal language. It suggests dissonance, misalignment, a life that doesn’t resonate with the story we tell about it. In Jung’s context, that discord points toward the shadow - the disowned parts of the psyche - and toward individuation, the lifelong project of becoming whole. The quote isn’t a scold; it’s a diagnostic. If you can hear the faint wrong note, you’re already closer to the truth than pride wants you to be.