Top 100 Quotes About The Unconscious
#1. Nuclear energy is a waste of time. They should go about harnessing the power of the unconscious when it is in the act of denying Death.
Steve Toltz
#2. I would not want to be a politician ... Let me tell you this: If I was campaigning, and I go against my opponent and he started attacking my character, and I leap over the table and choke him unconscious, would that help my campaign?
Chuck Norris
#4. Unlearning is the choice, conscious or unconscious, of any real artist. And it is the true sign of maturity.
Madeleine L'Engle
#5. Just as ripples radiate from the place where a stone is thrown into a pool of water, our sometime-unconscious thoughts, feelings, emotions, and beliefs create the "disturbances" in the field that become the blueprints for our lives.
Gregg Braden
#6. Each leg of our trip gets worse and worse. I wish someone would knock me unconscious until the madness ended.
Victoria Prince
#7. The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the unconscious.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#8. Woman, in short, has an unconscious life, man a conscious life, and the genius the most conscious life.
Otto Weininger
#9. All the above is, of course, a gross simplification. There are deeper reasons to travel - itches and tickles on the underbelly of the unconscious mind. We go where we need to go, and then try to figure out what we're doing there.
Jeff Greenwald
#10. Only by discovering alchemy have I clearly understood that the Unconscious is a process and that ego's rapport with the Unconscious and its contents initiate an evolution, more precisely, a real metamorphosis of the psyche.
Carl Jung
#11. When the writing fit came on, she gave herself up to it with entire abandon, and led a blissful life, unconscious of want, care, or bad weather, while she sat safe and happy in an imaginary world, full of friends almost as real and dear to her as any in the flesh.
Louisa May Alcott
#12. She wanders on like a poplar leaf borne upon a whirlwind of unconscious associations, she, her youth, her illusions and her former happiness remembered now through the mists of a ruined mind.
Comte De Lautreamont
#13. Music, Schopenhauer wrote, is not unconscious arithmetic, as Leibniz had claimed, but unconscious philosophy, since in music the inner essence of the world, which is will, is made directly present to the mind.
Roger Scruton
#14. the English explorer Richard Burton told the story of an Englishman finding his new wife unconscious on the marital bed, having chloroformed herself. She had pinned a note to her nightdress which read: 'Mama says you're to do what you like.
Sam Miller
#15. When the personal soul life is burnt to ashes, a woman loses the vital treasure and begins to get dry boned as Death. In her unconscious, the desire for the red shoes, a wild joy, not only continues, it swells and floods, and eventually staggers to its feet and takes over, ferocious and famished.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#16. Four young men in motorcycle jackets... set upon the man in khaki shorts and beat him unconscious with his own sandwich board.
Stephen King
#17. The Superego, in censoring the unconscious and in implanting conscience, also censors the censor.
Herbert Marcuse
#18. Excitement, like enthusiasm, sometimes renders us unconscious to the things of earth.
Alexandre Dumas
#19. When you are completely absorbed or caught up in something, you become oblivious to things around you, or to the passage of time. It is this absorption in what you are doing that frees your unconscious and releases your creative imagination.
Rollo May
#20. In his creative work the artist is dependent on sources and resources deriving from the spiritual unconscious.
Viktor E. Frankl
#21. If only a world-wide consciousness could arise that all division and fission are due to the splitting of opposites in the psyche, then we should know where to begin.
C. G. Jung
#22. Emphatic and reiterated assertion, especially during childhood, produces in most people a belief so firm as to have a hold even over the unconscious.
Bertrand Russell
#23. The starry vault of heaven is in truth the open book of cosmic projection, in which are reflected the mythologems, i.e., the archetypes. In this vision astrology and alchemy, the two classical functionaries of the psychology of the collective unconscious, join hands.
C. G. Jung
#24. I tend to think of myself as a highly emotional writer. It's all coming out of the deepest feelings, out of dreams, out of the unconscious.
Jonathan Lethem
#25. Out of the unconscious lips of babes and sucklings are we satirized.
Mark Twain
#26. When two people have been married for years they seem to become unconscious of each other's bodily presence so that they move as if alone, speak aloud things which they do not expect to be answered, and in general seem to experience all the comfort of solitude without its loneliness.
Virginia Woolf
#27. The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution born anew in the brain structure of every individual.
Carl Jung
#28. When under attack, our heart can take a similarly sudden and unconscious turn. When faced with pressure and strong opinions, we often stop worrying about the goal of adding to the pool of meaning and start looking for ways to win, punish, or keep the peace.
Kerry Patterson
#29. You may not yet be able to bring your unconscious mind activity into awareness as thoughts, but it will always be reflected in the body as an emotion, and of this you can become aware.
Eckhart Tolle
#30. The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life.
Carl Jung
#31. social infancy, regarded the legends of their faith as a child reads a fairy tale, credulous of all that is supernatural in the agency--unconscious of all that may be philosophical in the moral. It is true, indeed, that dim
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
#32. All ages before ours believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment in symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, which is to say, as archetypes of the unconscious. No doubt this discovery is hardly credible as yet.
Carl Jung
#33. I scarcely ever," he said, with an unconscious and colossal arrogance, "hear of anything on the face of the earth that I do not understand at once, without going to see it." And he led the way out into the purple night.
The Club of Queer Trades
G.K. Chesterton
#34. Man's desire for God is bedded in his unconscious & seeks to satisfy itself in physical possession of another human. This necessarily is a passing, fading attachment in its sensuous aspects since it is a poor substitute for what the unconscious is after.
Flannery O'Connor
#35. Everything we (the Grateful Dead) ever did was a demonstration of the value of cross-fertilization, It was unconscious at first, but when we started looking at each other, we had all these different influences ... Bobby Weir used to call it electric Dixieland.
Phil Lesh
#36. He who is unconscious of the ties which connect him with every individual of his species feels no obligation to make sacrifices for their welfare or happiness.
Benjamin Robbins Curtis
#37. Self-awareness moves us beyond the old, well-worn pathways in the brain that support fixed, unconscious habits.
Deepak Chopra
#38. Freud has shown one thing very clearly: that we only forget our infancy by burying it in the unconscious; and that the problems of this difficult period find their solution under a disguised form in adult life.
Herbert Read
#39. Can I have a glass of water?" Her voice was hoarse, probably from screaming. She'd always sounded like that after they'd-
He didn't just force the thought aside. He clubbed it unconscious, threw it into a crawl space and walled it up alive.
Jenny Trout
#40. I knew that by this time tomorrow, I was going to be eternally grateful for falling down the stairs and knocking myself unconscious. Smartest dumbest thing I'd ever done.
Erin McCarthy
#41. The human mind is indeed a cave swarming with strange forms of life, most of them unconscious and unilluminated. Unless we can understand something as to how the motives that issue from this obscurity are generated, we can hardly hope to foresee or control them.
Charles Horton Cooley
#43. INTO HER DARKNESS, a churning synaesthesia, where her pain was the taste of old iron, scent of melon, wings of a moth brushing her cheek. She was unconscious, and he was barred from her dreams.
William Gibson
#44. The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions.
Italo Calvino
#45. You have got to have a concept of the volume around here."
"Was the dream wishful thinking, or could Spirit be indestructible, like the conservation of matter, hidden from the conscious mind but perceived by the unconscious?
Phil Arnold
#46. it is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some dim billiard room of his unconscious, that when he built "The Breakers" he damned himself.
Joan Didion
#47. Our angels often come to us in the times when we are unconscious because those are the times we are free of the continual thoughts of our mind. It is here that we remember who we really are. We remember who we are in our soul. We are greater than the physical life we have been living on earth.
Kate McGahan
#49. The nurse is temporarily the consciousness of the unconscious, the love of life for the suicidal, the leg of the amputee, the eyes of the newly blind, a means of locomotion for the infant, the knowledge and confidence of the young mother, and a voice for those too weak to speak.
Virginia Henderson
#50. The greatest sin is to be unconscious.
Carl Jung
#51. Men believe themselves to have free will because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined. - BARUCH SPINOZA
Cris Evatt
#52. The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter - in the eye.
Charlotte Bronte
#53. The purpose of art: to make the unconscious conscious.
Richard Wagner
#54. Son, how violent is yer woman?" The older man asked sounding curious. Aiden leaned in and whispered. "She knocked me unconscious once with the back of my toilet." The older man's eyes widened. "Better get you some chocolate bars. You can throw those from a distance." Aiden nodded.
Anonymous
#55. The fear of loss, in one form or another, is the motivator behind all conscious and unconscious dishonesties.
David Whyte
#56. She seemed a series of slight flaws best expressed in a beauty spot above her right lip. And he understood that the sum of all these blemishes was somehow beauty, and there was about this beauty a power, and that power was at once conscious and unconscious.
Richard Flanagan
#57. The unconscious mind writes poetry if it's left alone.
Stephen King
#58. Baravetto was unconscious when we found him," Hi said. "What'd you do to the guy?"
"Kicked him in the balls, then brained him with a rolling pin. Twice.
Kathy Reichs
#59. But in this life we take turns at being enchanting, then enchanted. First we play in the streets, unaware of the freedom burning in the sun on our hair and the cigarette in our mouth, unconscious of the daydreams we inspire. Then it's our time to sit at a window and watch, and we are moved.
Jardine Libaire
#60. Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.
Antonin Artaud
#61. The river in front of her was black. She thought it contained many things.
Gisele Prassinos
#62. Throughout the ages, stories with certain basic themes have recurred over and over, in widely disparate cultures; emerging like the goddess Venus from the sea of our unconscious.
Joan D. Vinge
#63. There is no doubt that the resistance of the conscious and unconscious ego operates under the sway of the pleasure principle: it seeks to avoid the unpleasure which would be produced by the liberation of the repressed.
Sigmund Freud
#64. Whenever you try to pick market tops and bottoms, you are making a prediction. Guessing what stock is going to outperform the market is forecasting, as is selling a stock for no apparent reason. Indeed, nearly all capital decisions made by most people are unconscious predictions.
Barry Ritholtz
#65. The more you work with your dreams and your unconscious, and honor it, the more you understand it and it understands you. When you develop a relationship with your psyche this way, you begin to carry that energy into life and your relationships.
Marion Woodman
#66. An explanation." Sicarius regarded her intently. "Clarify the situation with the emperor. I could not understand the incoherent jumble you spit out before falling unconscious.
Lindsay Buroker
#67. Many fairy tales and ballads present us with animals who are nobler, truer, and kinder than the greedy human beings who desire to possess them. I guess I tend to read these stories as very early (and possibly unconscious) feminist texts.
Delia Sherman
#68. That we are bound to the earth does not mean that we cannot grow; on the contrary it is the sine qua non of growth. No noble, well-grown tree ever disowned its dark roots, for it grows not only upward but downward as well.
C. G. Jung
#69. God cannot catch us. Unless we stay in the unconscious room. Of our hearts.
Patrick Kavanagh
#71. Among a thousand other things, she loved Alex for his easy use of we. His willing, unconscious way of taking an oar at the galley of your problem, even if it was just to listen. Even if both of you knew he couldn't do jack shit to help, he made it about us and made you feel less alone. "I
Suanne Laqueur
#72. There is no sense talking about "being true to yourself" until you are sure what voice you are being true to. It takes hard work to differentiate the voices of the unconscious.
Marion Woodman
#73. Our unconscious is like a vast subterranean factory with intricate machinery that is never idle, where work goes on day and night from the time we are born until the moment of our death.
Milton Sapirstein
#74. Briefly summarising, we can express the proposed law thus: consciousness is bound up with learning in organic substance; organic competence is unconscious. Still more briefly, and put in a form which is admittedly rather obscure and open to misunderstanding: Becoming is conscious, being unconscious.
Erwin Schrodinger
#75. Everyone at a high level has a huge amount of chess understanding, and much of what separates the great from the very good is deep presence, relaxation of the conscious mind, which allows the unconscious to flow unhindered.
Josh Waitzkin
#76. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.
Henry David Thoreau
#77. Then the horror overcame me, and I sank down unconscious. CHAPTER
Bram Stoker
#78. Even a small, everyday lie is a clue to the personality and preoccupations of the liar, like a dream or any other confection of the mind, that is half-conscious and half-unconscious, as all creative acts must be.
Helen McCloy
#79. It has been said that great art is the night thought of man. It may emerge without warning from the soundless depths of the unconscious, just as supernovas may blaze up suddenly in the farther reaches of void space.
Loren Eiseley
#80. Music is a secret and unconscious mathematical problem of the soul.
Gottfried Leibniz
#81. Reality! But what does this word mean? Each has his own reality. I draw upon my personal reality upon the dark side of myself, my unconscious.
Federico Fellini
#82. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.
D.H. Lawrence
#83. When you're mid-season, in very intense situations, it's hard not to take that home with you. Especially when you're sleeping, you can't control what you dream about. And it sneaks into the unconscious.
Aaron Paul
#84. The professional tackles the project that will make him stretch. He takes on the assignment that will bear him into uncharted waters, compel him to explore unconscious parts of himself.
Steven Pressfield
#85. It seems the best work I do is when I am really allowing the unconscious to rule the page and then later I can go back and hack around and make sense of things ...
Aimee Bender
#86. In the products of the unconscious we discover mandala symbols, that is, circular and quaternity figures which express wholeness, and whenever we wish to express wholeness, we employ just such figures.
Carl Jung
#87. What I enjoy most about doing voiceovers is that you can be completely unconscious with the rest of your body and just concentrate on doing something with your voice, creating an entire character with your voice.
Justin Long
#88. For his part, the stranger was drifting in Annabel's direction, yet not very deliberately. As if, in some way, he were being drawn to her, by some (unconscious) motion or motive of Annabel herself. Why
Joyce Carol Oates
#89. The unconscious compulsion to enhance one's identity through association with an object is built into the very structure of the egoic mind.
Eckhart Tolle
#90. Tess," I say. "I'm going to head down to the water.I'll be back in a minute."
"You sure you can make it by yourself?" she asks.
"I'll be fine." I smile. "If you see me floating unconscious out to sea,though-by all means,come and get me.
Marie Lu
#91. Number is therefore the most primitive instrument of bringing an unconscious awareness of order into consciousness.
Marie-Louise Von Franz
#92. The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
Anthony Burgess
#93. We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos- the right moment- for a 'metamorphosis of the gods', of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing.
Carl Jung
#94. Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals.
Lewis Mumford
#95. Any writer is inevitably going to work with his own anxieties and desires. If the book is any good it has got to have in it the fire of a personal unconscious mind.
Iris Murdoch
#96. If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.
Manuel Puig
#97. Olenin always took his own path and had an unconscious objection to the beaten tracks.
Leo Tolstoy
#98. The unconscious fabric of human destiny had done with her, unraveling all her grievances and reweaving them as joyous circumstance.
Michelle Franklin
#99. Insight roams the sea of the unconscious like the Loch Ness monster, a rumor whose wake occasionally becomes visible, but even then it's mystifying and scarcely believed.
Diane Ackerman
#100. The only craft and technique you have legitimate access to is the craft and technique you forgot, that has dissolved itself into the unconscious ... Because you have learned it so well you have forgotten it.
Robert Olen Butler
