Those with an INFJ personality tend to be very idealistic, curious, creative, and intuitive. They are secretive, and only share their thoughts and ideas with people they trust. They are also rare — INFJs are less than two percent of the population.
I have created a list of the best 100 quotes that will resonate to this personality type.
You can keep reading to find out exactly who INFJs are, how they think and behave, and why they are called this way. Alternately, feel free to skip to the quotes right now.
Jung’s types
In 1921 psychiatrist Carl Jung published the book Psychological Types.
In the book, Jung proposes that there are two main types of people: those who are predominantly extroverted, and those who are predominantly introverted.
Though it’s impossible to be 100 percent extroverted or introverted, most people will clearly lean toward one side of the spectrum.
Extroverts are individuals who direct their energy toward the outer world: they crave external stimuli, love objects, and tend to recharge through social interactions. They often accept their external environment “as it is”, and think and act quickly.
Conversely, introverts usually direct their energy toward the inner world. Rather than judging things based on what they see and hear objectively, they form impressions based on the ideas, thoughts, and feelings triggered by these objects. Introverts usually think and act slowly.
Though extroversion and introversion is the main distinction, Jung proposes that there’s two more ways people tend to act differently.
One has to do with how people perceive the world, and whether they consider emotions or thoughts to be more important: some tend to think more, others tend to feel more.
The second distinction is about how we process information. Someone who is mainly sensing perceives the world through what they see in the “here and now”. Conversely, those who use intuition form impressions of objects based on the ideas, thoughts, and feelings triggered by them (rather than judging things objectively).
Based on these key distinctions, Jung concludes that even though each and every one of us has a unique personality, we can identify the psychological traits of a person by determining whether they lean toward extroversion or introversion; thinking or feeling; sensing or intuitive.
There are, then, eight main personality types:
- Extroverted, thinking
- Extroverted, feeling
- Extroverted, sensing
- Extroverted, intuitive
- Introverted, thinking
- Introverted, feeling
- Introverted, sensing
- Introverted, intuitive
Myers—Briggs types
Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers studied Jung’s theory and developed their own version of it.
Although their work differs from that of Jung in many different aspects, the main difference is that in Myers—Briggs theory there are sixteen personality types instead of eight.
In their theory, an individual’s personality is determined based on whether they are more extroverted or introverted, thinking or feeling, sensing or intuitive, just like in Jung’s original theory, however there is also a fourth criteria: perceiving or judging.
This criteria has to do with the way people make decisions and how they want their life to look like.
Someone who is mostly perceiving tends to be spontaneous and open minded, and “go with the flow”. They like to keep plans to a minimum, and they embrace life’s uncertainty.
An individual who is mostly judging, on the other hand, wants things to be orderly and organized. He or she likes to plan everything in advance, and takes decisions very seriously; he or she often needs to be in control in order to feel safe.
Because of this fourth key distinction, the Myers—Briggs types are sixteen in total.
Each type is named with a four-letter acronym that defines their main traits. So for instance, a person who is mainly extroverted (E), intuitive (N), thinking (T), and perceiving (P) is named ENTP.
INFJ personality type
Apparently, this is the rarest personality type in the world: INFJs are believed to make up less than two percent of the population.
Now, does this mean INFJs are better, or superior than others? Absolutely not — even according to Jung and Myers—Briggs, each personality type is equally important and needed. Each type contributes to the world in a different way, and there’s no “best” or “worst”.
As the acronym says, these are the individuals who are predominantly introverted (I); they prefer to use their intuition rather than sensing (N); they tend to feel more than they think (F); finally, they are judging (J).
- I — Introversion
- N — Intuition
- F — Feeling
- J — Judging
The INFJ personality can be difficult to understand, mainly because they tend to be very private and secretive. They protect their inner world as they are aware that most people would not understand or appreciate their thoughts.
INFJs are idealists with strong values; they are gentle and tactful, and always take into consideration other people’s feelings.
They also use their intuition a lot: this makes them capable of creating visionary works of art, finding easy solutions to complex problems, and even being ahead of their times.
But when intuition is given too much importance, they can also become too detached from the external world, and quite irrational.
INFJs also tend to be perfectionists; they often have very high standards, and expect the best from others and themselves. This, again, can lead them to greatness, but also to frustration and even mental health problems.
So it’s important that, just like all other personality types, INFJs learn to use their traits to their advantage, so they can be at their best and contribute to the world.
INFJ quotes
It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover.
— Henri Poincare
If the intuitive introvert spoke what he really perceives, then practically nobody would understand him; he would be misunderstood. So they learn to keep things to themselves, and you hardly ever hear them talk of these things.
— Carl Jung
The things that make me different are the things that make me.
— Alan Alexander Milne
I guess if you have an original take on life, or something about you is original, you don’t have to study people who came before you. You don’t have to mimic anybody. You just have a gut feeling inside, an instinct that tells you what’s right for you, and you can’t do it in any other way.
— Barbra Streisand
Intuition is a perception by ways or means of the unconscious.
— Carl Jung
We are born with this inner guidance, which comes in the form of the emotions and desires that lead us toward things (including thoughts) that feel good and are good for us, and away from things that feel bad and are bad for us.
— Christiane Northrup
What sets you apart can sometimes feel like a burden, and it’s not. And a lot of the time it’s what makes you great.
— Emma Stone
I am a very private person. No one ever knows anything about me as I don’t think it is necessary. I tell people as much as I want them to know about me.
— Priyanka Chopra
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. 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
When you listen with empathy to another person, you give that person psychological air.
— Stephen Covey
As long as your ideas of what is possible are limited by what is actual, no other idea has a chance.
— Susan Neiman
You are unrepeatable. There is a magic about you that is all your own.
— David Dellinger
I am rarely bored alone; I am often bored in groups and crowds.
— Laurie Helgoe
Your mind knows only some things. Your inner voice, your instinct, knows everything. If you listen to what you know instinctively, it will always lead you down the right path.
— Henry Winkler
Art, freedom, and creativity will change society faster than politics.
— Victor Pinchuk
If you are always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be.
— Maya Angelou
Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
— Steve Jobs
The introverted intuitive has, in a way, a very difficult life, although one of the most interesting lives.
— Carl Jung
We need solitude, because when we’re alone, we’re free from obligations, we don’t need to put on a show, and we can hear our own thoughts.
— Tamim Ansary
Listen to your inner voice, for it is a deep and powerful source of wisdom, beauty, and truth ever flowing through you. Learn to trust it — trust your intuition, and in good time, answers to all you seek to know will come, and the path will open before you.
— Caroline Joy Adams
Sensitive people usually love deeply and hate deeply. They don’t know any other way to live than by extremes because their emotional thermostat is broken.
— Shannon Alder
Nothing can harm you as much as your own thoughts unguarded.
— Buddha
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
— Bertrand Russell
It’s your road, and yours alone. Others may walk it with you, but no one can walk it for you.
— Rumi
By being yourself, you put something wonderful in the world that was not there before.
— Edwin Elliott
Some people think only intellect counts: knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize it. But the functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion, and empathy.
— Dean Koontz
Being an idealist is not being a simpleton; without idealists there would be no optimism and without optimism there would be no courage to achieve advances that so-called realists would have you believe could never come to fruition.
— Alisa Dana Steinberg
Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last, you create what you will.
— George Bernard Shaw
For you to speak, it is necessary for you to listen, for God speaks in the silence of the heart.
— Mother Teresa
Better to embrace the discomfort of being different than the comfort of fitting in.
— Ogwo David Emenike
Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.
— Criss Jami
If you have realistic ideals and can generally live up to them, your self-esteem will not be threatened. If your ideals are exaggerated and you cannot reach them, your good feelings from successes may be short lived, and you may feel that you are never good enough.
— Mary Lamia
Being different is… interesting; there’s nothing implicitly inferior or superior about it. Great difference, of course, produces natural caution; and if the differences are too extreme… well, then, reality tends to fade away.
— Edward Albee
Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.
— Plato
At times you have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you will discover will be wonderful. What you will discover is yourself.
— Alan Alda
Be willing to go all out in pursuit of your dream. Ultimately it will pay off. You are more powerful than you think you are.
— Les Brown
If you connect with a greater part of yourself, knowledge comes in, including intuition, and it’s always about “what is my heart’s sole desire?”
— James Redfield
The best part about being alone is that you really don’t have to answer to anybody. You do what you want.
— Justin Timberlake
The person who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The person who walks alone is likely to find themselves in places no one has ever seen before.
— Albert Einstein
There’s zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.
— Susan Cain
When the Universe compels me toward the best path to take, it never leaves me with “maybe”, “should I”, or even “perhaps”. I always know for sure when it is telling me to proceed because everything inside me rises up to reverberate: “yes!”
— Oprah Winfrey
I feel there are two people inside me — me and my intuition. If I go against her, she’ll screw me every time, and if I follow her, we get along quite nicely.
— Kim Basinger
Intuitives show a quite extraordinary inability to register sensation facts; they have extraordinary fantasies about a thing, they intuit what is inside the locked drawer, but have no idea what the bureau looks like outside.
— Carl Jung
People have a problem with me being different, but that propels me forward in life.
— Mary-Louise Parker
All great men are gifted with intuition. They know without reasoning or analysis, what they need to know.
— Alexis Carrel
Intuition is the key to everything — painting, filmmaking, business — everything. I think you could have an intellectual ability, but if you can sharpen your intuition, which they say is emotion and intellect joining together, then a knowingness occurs.
— David Lynch
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
— Albert Einstein
Our intuition is like a muscle: we must practice listening to it and trusting its wisdom. When you take the time to ask and keep listening to the answer, being at peace becomes easy.
— Lisa Prosen
I have only one confidant, and that is the silence of the night. Why is it my confidant? Because it remains silent.
— Soren Kierkegaard
One of the most difficult types is the intuitive introvert. The introvert variety is more difficult because he has intuitions as to the subjective factor, namely the inner world, and of course that is very difficult to understand. What he sees are the most uncommon things, and he doesn’t like to talk about them if he’s not a fool. He would spoil his own game by saying what he sees, because people wouldn’t understand it.
— Carl Jung
Every time you don’t follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual deadness.
— Shakti Gawain
Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
— Oscar Wilde
Sometimes being different feels a lot like being alone. But with that said, being true to that and being true to my standards and my way of doing things in my art and my music, everything that has made me feel very different, in the end, has made me the happiest.
— Lindsey Stirling
Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data.
— John Niasbitt
Never discredit your gut instinct. You are not paranoid. Your body can pick up on bad vibrations. If something deep inside of you says something is not right about a person or situation, trust it.
— Anonymous
I thought not fitting in was something I had to fix. Now I see it as my superpower.
— Maxime Lagacé
I’m a private person. And I have a certain way in which I protect myself. I don’t openly wear my feelings.
— Katrina Kaif
Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
— Carl Jung
Truly creative people care a little about what they have done, and a lot about what they are doing.
— Alan Cohen
I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me.
— Charles Bukowski
By believing passionately in something that still doesn’t exist, we create it.
— Nikos Kazantzakis
Introverts are collectors of thoughts, and solitude is where the collection is curated and rearranged to make sense of the present and future.
— Laurie Helgoe
It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old; they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.
— Gabriel García Márquez
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
— Albert Einstein
Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
— T. S. Eliot
When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you.
— Susan Sarandon
They come into the presence of somebody they don’t know, and suddenly they have inner images, and these inner images give them a more or less complete information about the psychology of the person.
— Carl Jung
It is easier to believe in the ideal than it is to achieve it, but it is impossible to achieve the ideal if one does not believe in it.
— Josh Steimle
The only way to change someone’s mind is to connect with them from the heart.
— Rasheed Ogunlaru
If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, and maybe even your mind. (…) If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.
— Charles Bukowski
A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
I am an absurd idealist. But I believe that all that must come true. For, unless it comes true, the world will be laid desolate.
— Leslie Charteris
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
— Aldous Huxley
Short INFJ quotes
If you are not going all the way, why go at all?
— Joe Namath
Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.
— Audre Lorde
Solitude is the soul’s holiday.
— Katrina Kenison
My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.
— Edith Sitwell
The more idealism proves futile, the more I respect idealists.
— Marty Rubin
What makes you different makes you beautiful.
— Anonymous
Intuition is the clear conception of the whole at once.
— Johann Kaspar Lavater
I don’t want to be alone. I want to be left alone.
— Audrey Hepburn
The highest form of knowledge is empathy.
— Bill Bullard
Quiet people have the loudest minds.
— Stephen Hawking
— Walt Disney
Creativity is a drug I cannot live without.
— Cecil DeMille
I think a lot, but I don’t say much.
— Anne Frank
This is what intuition is for: it is the direct messenger of the soul.
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés
The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are.
— Jim Morrison
There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen.
— Rumi
Learn to trust yourself and you will create a meaningful life.
— Lynn Robinson
True change takes place in the imagination.
— Thomas Moore
Your heart and your gut are still your best guide.
— Naveen Jain
My imagination functions much better when I don’t have to speak to people.
— Patricia Highsmith
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
— Steve Jobs
Feeling too much is a hell of a lot better than feeling nothing.
— Nora Roberts
Live your life the way you want, not the way society tells you.
— Maxime Lagacé
I’m indecisive because I see eight sides to everything.
— April Kepner
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
— Albert Einstein
I am a minimalist. I like to say the most with the least.
— Bob Newhart
One can be instructed in society; one is inspired only in solitude.
— Goethe
Which of these quotes resonates with you the most? Let me know by leaving a comment 👇
