Top 100 Quotes About The Unconscious
#1. No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes.
Alfred North Whitehead
#2. Ninety-five percent of thought, emotion, and learning occur in the unconscious mind
that is, without our awareness,
Gerald Zaltman
#3. The unconscious in us warns us that in art we have to followoneparticular path. And if wefollow it, it isnotthe sign of anunconscious act.On the contrary, it showsthat there is in our ordinary consciousness a greater awareness of our unconsciousness.
Piet Mondrian
#4. So where do the ideas-the salable ideas-come from? They come from my nightmares. Not the night-time variety, as a rule, but the ones that hide just beyond the doorway that separates the conscious from the unconscious.
Stephen King
#5. Art is the uniting of the subjective with the objective,
of nature with reason, of the unconscious with the conscious, and
therefore art is the highest means of knowledge.
Leo Tolstoy
#6. The darkness which clings to every personality is the door into the unconscious and the gateway of dreams, from which those two twilight figures, the shadow and the anima, step into our nightly visions or, remaining invisible, take possession of our ego-consciousness.
Carl Jung
#7. The unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it.
George Bernard Shaw
#8. There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.
Donna Tartt
#9. Like the sea itself, the unconscious yields an endless and self-replenishing abundance of creatures, a wealth beyond our fathoming.
Carl Jung
#10. A man whose consciousness is possessed by a particular content has an enormous dynamism in him, namely that of the unconscious content; but this counteracts the centroversion tendency of the ego to work for the whole rather than for the individual content.
Erich Neumann
#11. Mathematics are the result of mysterious powers which no one understands, and which the unconscious recognition of beauty must play an important part. Out of an infinity of designs a mathematician chooses one pattern for beauty's sake and pulls it down to earth.
Marston Morse
#12. History, that is, the unconscious, common, swarm life of mankind uses every moment of the life of kings as an instrument for its own ends
Leo Tolstoy
#13. whatever may have been the crimes of England, she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.
Anonymous
#14. He (William Howard Taft) had little patience with the unconscious arrogance of conscious wealth and financial success.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#15. The unconscious democracy of America is a very fine thing. It is a true and deep and instinctive assumption of the equality of citizens, which even voting and elections have not destroyed.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#16. Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what's in it - they should, because they put it all in beforehand.
Saul Bellow
#17. A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture. Ruins become the unconscious of a city, it's memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it to life
Rebecca Solnit
#18. Affective reactions resulting from fascination are dangerous; they amount to an invasion by the unconscious.
Erich Neumann
#19. In a sense, what's happening is that the unconscious mind is a luxury the human species cannot afford at this point in our dilemma, and so the unconscious mind is simply rising into consciousness by being hardwired into this global infrastructure.
Terence McKenna
#20. But he didn't hold me when we slept. We didn't make love. He didn't curl his fingers around my breast in the unconscious but still possessive way Max was doing at that very moment.
Kristen Ashley
#21. The beginning of art is not reason. It is the buried treasure of the unconscious ... that unconscious which has more understanding than our lucidity.
Edgard Varese
#22. Complexes are psychic contents which are outside the control of the conscious mind. They have been split off from consciousness and lead a separate existence in the unconscious, being at all times ready to hinder or to reinforce the conscious intentions.
Carl Jung
#23. The unconscious can become destructive if it is disregarded and thwarted.
Anais Nin
#24. Twenty-five years now and I still love to watch my wife sleep. I'm fascinated by the way the unconscious self (the deeper self) rises when consciousness falls away and often expresses itself in the face of a sleeper.
David Bottoms
#25. Man's task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.
Carl Jung
#26. The only weapon with which the unconscious patient can immediately retaliate upon the incompetent surgeon is hemorrhage.
William Stewart Halsted
#27. In Gnosticism, the way of salvation lies in heightening consciousness and returning to the transcendent spirit, with loss of the unconscious side; whereas uroboric salvation through the Great Mother demands the abandonment of the conscious principle and a homecoming to the unconscious.
Erich Neumann
#28. Your habits operate at the unconscious level; you are not normally aware of them. It's only by bringing a habit into your conscious awareness that you can observe what it's doing, how it empowers and serves you or doesn't.
Jeff Olson
#29. Sympathy for the enemy
a weakness of police and armies alike. Most perilous are the unconscious sympathies directing you to preserve your enemy intact because the enemy is your justification for existence.
Frank Herbert
#30. You don't have to wait for something "meaningful" to come into your life so that you can finally enjoy what you do. There is more meaning in joy than you will ever need. The "waiting to start living" syndrome is one of the most common delusions of the unconscious state.
Eckhart Tolle
#31. Music is an art that expresses the inexpressible. It rises far above what words can mean or the intelligence define. Its domain is the imponderable and impalpable land of the unconscious.
Charles Munch
#32. While Sigmund famously focused on the unconscious (the id), Anna made the ego seem more important, particularly in respect of therapy and psychoanalysis. Her
Tom Butler-Bowdon
#33. The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.
Jacques Lacan
#34. Not only Freud but artists and writers were also interested in the unconscious. It was medicine that made the first steps toward modernity.
Eric Kandel
#35. We find . . . in everyday life, where dilemmas are sometimes solved by the most surprising new propositions; many artists, philosophers, and even scientists owe some of their best ideas to inspirations . . . from the unconscious.
C. G. Jung
#36. Psychoanalysis comes down to the process itself - the self, and life. I think I can say that I'm friends with the unconscious life, but I've never tried to make a painting directly from a dream.
Malcolm Morley
#37. Poetry is a process of getting back to the unconscious. Hence, I am always writing-even when I'm not facing the white space. I feel writers are like reservoirs of images. We take in what is around us.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#38. 'The Master and Margarita' is deeply to do with the unconscious. It is a story about a man who writes a story in a time when he's not supposed to write that story: the story of Pontius Pilate.
Simon McBurney
#39. We know that communication must be hampered, and its form largely determined, by the unconscious but inevitable influence of a transmitting mechanism, whether that be of a merely mechanical or of a physiological character.
Oliver Joseph Lodge
#40. Dreams are the expression of the unconscious while we are asleep.
Nancy Friday
#41. The lamplight was eerie, and, standing there motionless in our bathrobes, sleepy, with shadows flickering all around, I felt as though I had woken from one dream into an even more remote one, some bizarre wartime bomb shelter of the unconscious.
Donna Tartt
#42. Whenever I hear about the woman's trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin'-says-lovin'-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level,
Anonymous
#43. Thinking prevents the unconscious from speaking.
Thomas Merton
#44. Operating in an unlit world, the unconscious mind is a brilliant detective.
Jo Coudert
#45. The conscious process is reflected in the imagination; the unconscious process is expressed as karma, the generation of actions divorced from thinking and alienated from feeling.
William Irwin Thompson
#47. A sense of reverence is necessary for psychological health. If a person has no sense of reverence, no feeling that there is anyone or anything that inspires awe, it cuts the personality off completely from the nourishing springs of the unconscious.
Robert Johnson
#48. Dissociated trauma memories are not attached to other memories by association. These memories go directly to the unconscious as a biological response separates awareness from consciousness. It's a natural, protective occurrence and it happens without will.
Jeanne McElvaney
#49. The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.
Sigmund Freud
#50. The desire to run comes from deep within us - from the unconscious, the instinctive, the intuitive.
George A. Sheehan
#51. The key to the understanding of the character of the conscious lies in the region of the unconscious.
Carl Gustav Carus
#52. Songwriting becomes a conscious attempt to delve into the unconscious. Even those writers who scoff at the concept of a spiritual source for their songs admit that the phenomenon of having them simply arrive feels magical.
Paul Zollo
#53. Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.
Anais Nin
#54. The age of puberty is a crisis in the age of man worth studying. It is the passage from the unconscious to the conscious; from thesleep of passions to their rage.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#55. The eyes were damned, the staring, glaring eyes of one who sees but does not see, eyes ever turned inward to the sterile hell of dreams beyond control, dreams unleashed, risen out of the stinking swamps of the unconscious.
Stephen King
#56. Intuition (is) perception via the unconscious
C. G. Jung
#57. So much of a novelist's writing ... takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.
Graham Greene
#58. To create a perfume you have to be the servant of the unconscious. Each idea evolves and transforms, but there should be a surprise with each note.
Serge Lutens
#59. Often in the case of these sudden transformations one can prove that an archetype has been at work for a long time in the unconscious, skilfully arranging circumstances that will unavoidably lead to a crisis.
C. G. Jung
#60. We're all looking for a bit of recognition, even if it's the unconscious and hypocritical need for attention over the fact that we're not publically seeking out attention.
Abby Rosmarin
#61. The other thing in composition is opening up the unconscious.
John Fahey
#62. He begins to notice that he has been turned out of the silent company of the trees, the animals, the stars, and the unconscious life.
Erich Maria Remarque
#63. Creativeness comes partly out of the unconscious, i.e., is a healthy regression, a temporary turning away from the real world.
Abraham H. Maslow
#64. Man cannot persist long in a conscious state, he must throw himself back into the unconscious, for his root lives there.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#65. Obviously astrology has much to offer psychology, but what the latter can offer its elder sister is less evident. So far as I judge, it would seem to me advantageous for astrology to take the existence of psychology into account, above all the psychology of the personality and of the unconscious.
Carl Jung
#66. The discs which haunt the skies of Earth indicate that the unconscious cannot be kept waiting forever. These things are going to have to be dealt with.
Terence McKenna
#67. Art always has something of the unconscious about it.
D.T. Suzuki
#68. Kafka truly illustrates the way the environment oppresses the individual. He shows how the unconscious controls our lives.
Manuel Puig
#69. What I think of as style - and I've gotten to this over years of really thinking about it - is that style is the unconscious choices I make.
John Corigliano
#70. None believes in his own death. In the unconscious everyone is convinced of his own immortality.
Sigmund Freud
#71. Moreover, there is no "unconscious" mind distinct from the conscious, for the "unconscious" mind is conscious, though not of itself, just as the eyes see but do not see themselves.
Alan W. Watts
#72. To probe for unconscious determinants of behavior and then define a man in their terms exclusively, ignoring his overt behavior altogether, is a greater distortion than ignoring the unconscious completely.
Willard Gaylin
#73. In the mythus a superhuman intelligence uses the unconscious thoughts and dreams of men as its hieroglyphics to address men unborn.
Henry David Thoreau
#74. Stories are best when they 'emerge' from the depths, and when built in a painting from early sketch through the three-act process to The End, it is a perfect pathway to the unconscious stories set in our dreamwork.
Billy Cannon
#75. The thing that I was brought up to prize above everything else is the intellect. There is no problem that the intellect cannot solve, but it never had an original thought. Originality is the realm of the unconscious.
Alan Garner
#76. He looked from the phone to the unconscious figure of the Salesman. "What did you do to him?" he asked.
"He got the wrong number," Alex said.
Anthony Horowitz
#77. Information storage has to take place at the unconscious level.
Paul G
#78. The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
Adrienne Rich
#79. He called dreams a 'royal road' into the unconscious, made up of all forbidden wishes you had and you wished you didn't
Jodi Picoult
#80. The unconscious process moves spiral-wise around a center, gradually getting closer, while the characteristics of the center grow more and more distinct.
Carl Jung
#81. Water is the commonest symbol for the unconscious.
Carl Jung
#82. There are dreams which belong only partly in the unconscious; these are the dreams we remember on waking so vividly that we deliberately continue them, and so fall asleep again and wake and sleep and the dream goes on without interruption, with a thread of logic the pure dream doesn't possess.
Graham Greene
#83. Ava's father believed that myths and fairy tales - like dreams - opened a window into the unconscious. by listening to the language of dreams and old tales, he said, all humans could learn to understand themselves and the world, better.
Kate Forsyth
#84. The thing is, if you believe in the unconscious - and I do - there's room for all kinds of possibilities that I don't know how you prove one way or another.
Jasper Johns
#85. Paint right into the darkness. While painting in these conditions the mind shifts gears, engaging the unconscious. Unique 'insights' happen in the dark.
Allison Mackie
#86. The answer is that we are not helpless in the face of our first impressions. They may bubble up from the unconscious - from behind a locked door inside of our brain - but just because something is outside of awareness doesn't mean it's outside of control.
Malcolm Gladwell
#88. Everything in art must spring from the movement of our whole life-stream, of our whole being - including the unconscious.
Marc Chagall
#89. Each day befriend a single fear, and the miscellaneous terrors of being human will never join together to form such a morass of vague anxiety that it rules your life from the shadows of the unconscious. We learn to fly not by being fearless, but by the daily practice of courage.
Sam Keen
#90. Doctor, what could you prescribe for Charlemund?"
The doctor looked down his nose at the unconscious form of the arch-diocel.
"Arsenic?"
"Now, really. Something to give him a quality headache and a great deal of memory loss."
"Cyanide.
Brian McClellan
#91. what people often thought of as instinct, was actually the unconscious brain trying to tell the logical mind that there was something happening which it needed to be aware of.
Scott Chapman
#92. To be rationally minded, the mental process of the intuitive appears to work backward. His conclusions are reached before his premises. This is not because the steps which connect the two have been omitted, but because those steps are taken by the unconscious.
Frances G. Wickes
#93. The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.
Sigmund Freud
#94. Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.
Sigmund Freud
#95. Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
Jean Cocteau
#96. The greatest impediments to changes in our traditional roles seem to lie not in the visible world of conscious intent, but in the murky realm of the unconscious mind.
Augustus Y. Napier
#97. Man will change nothing of his final destiny, which is to return sooner or later to the unconscious and the formless.
Henry Miller
#98. The unconscious of an artist is her greatest treasure. It is what transmutes the dross of autobiography into the gold of myth.
Erica Jong
#99. I feel there's a power in theatre, but it's an indirect power. It's like the relationship of the sleeper to the unconscious. You discover things you can't afford to countenance in waking life. You can forget them, remember them a day later or not have any idea what they are about.
Tony Kushner
#100. Abstract art is a creative interplay between the conscious and the unconscious, with the conscious mind making all the final decisions and in control throughout.
Lawren Harris
