Top 115 Unconscious Quotes

As with all great works of literature, ‘Of Mice and Men’ moves with the inexorability of a huge river, and it pours itself, exhausts itself, in the sea of our unconscious. Having read it, we carry the book inside us forever.

I think everyone’s pretty much the same underneath. The collective unconscious is a real thing. There’s only a few emotions, and we all have them. There’s, like, seven emotions. So personal is universal. Everyone experiences confusion, joy and pain, just in different forms.

Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious.

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.

You have many years ahead of you to create the dreams that we can’t even imagine dreaming. You have done more for the collective unconscious of this planet than you will ever know.

When I write an email where I outlined a whole scene, it just came out of my unconscious, it comes from a deeper place. The same thing happens when the actors go, take after take, and just get lost in it. When you’re in a house, you don’t think about being in the house; you’re just there.

I’m a very lucky man. It’s a beautiful thing for a writer, to see people allowing your words to enter their own unconscious and their souls.

Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course.

People spend a lot of time talking and thinking about how members of the opposite sex look, but very little time paying attention to how they sound. To our unconscious minds, however, voice is very important.

The reason is that for many years I have avoided reading anything whatsoever that approaches my own line of country, out of a somewhat fanatical desire to avoid the risk of unconscious imitation.

You fall in love with somebody who fits within what I call your ‘love map,’ an unconscious list of traits that you build in childhood as you grow up. And I also think that you gravitate to certain people, actually, with somewhat complementary brain systems.

The men of action are, after all, only the unconscious instruments of the men of thought.

Sigmund Freud was very much a creature of his time. He did not ‘invent’ the unconscious.

At that moment Mr. Clifford, quite unconscious that he and his most personal feelings and aspirations were subjects of discussion, was turning from the main road into the lower road.

I’m not that keen on the idea of being unconscious.

In the child, consciousness rises out of the depths of unconscious psychic life, at first like separate islands, which gradually unite to form a ‘continent,’ a continuous landmass of consciousness. Progressive mental development means, in effect, extension of consciousness.

I once made myself black out by pulling G too quickly while flying an F-18. Being unconscious in a single-seat airplane is not good. Fortunately, I woke up in time. I learned how to better plug-in my anti-G suit.

The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

It’s my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel’s aesthetic facade.

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.

Our heart glows, and secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. Dealing with the unconscious has become a question of life for us.

If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.

I believe in the unconscious state of the mind in death.

I’m not reading what I write when I wrote. It’s an unconscious outpouring that’s a mess, and it’s many, many steps away from anything anyone would want to read. Creating that way seems to generate the most interesting material for me to work with, though.

A boxing ring looks different from the inside, particularly when it’s shared with another man who is intent upon rendering you unconscious. There’s no place to hide. Once a fighter climbs the stairs, he’s roped in, unable to leave until his night’s work is done.

For a long time, I would write without music, because I thought it was distracting until I appreciated that it actually unlocks a certain unconscious productivity vault in my mind.

Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

As much as they deny it, I think people want to be scared. It’s a phenomenon, why people want to be scared when there is so much violence and craziness in the world. People still really enjoy being scared. It’s a conundrum to me. It’s hard to explain. It’s an unconscious thing, really, why people like that so much.

This country has been unconscious, and it’s got to awake. That’s my belief.

It’s common knowledge that professional athletes earn extraordinary incomes. What is less known or understood is how the advent of these riches has seeped into the conscious and unconscious ways in which our society now parents children.

But I now think what I was doing, in a completely unconscious way, was getting off the turf where my husband and I might be rivals. We were both working in fiction… so I look back and I see that I consciously vacated the contested ground.

I do tend to think that I’ve written a great deal out of my unconscious because half the time I don’t know what a given character is going to say next.

I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self.

The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.

The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter – often an unconscious, but still a truthful interpreter – in the eye.

I am not unconscious of the persuasive power exerted by these considerations to drag men along in the current; but I am not at liberty to travel that road.

Here’s what the right-wing has in, there’s no shortage of the natural resources of ignorance, apathy, hate, fear. As long as those things are in the collective conscious and unconscious, the Republicans will have some votes.

The violent quarrel between the abstractionists and the surrealists seems to me quite unnecessary. All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements – order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious.

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.

The images attempt to capture scientific thought. They represent the physical manifestation of the thought process. Everything in the laboratory is a product of a stream of conscious or unconscious thought.

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.

The unconscious is much smarter than the conscious.

Of course our feelings matter. But emotional decisions are usually not the best ones. On the other hand, your emotions can affect your decisions whether you like it or not because the effects can occur on the unconscious level.

Strong moral arguments exist for why we should often try to ignore stereotypes or override them. But we shouldn’t assume they represent some irrational quirk of the unconscious mind. In fact, they’re largely the consequence of the mind’s attempt to make a rational decision.

The people who are most susceptible to hypnosis – the rugger bugger types – were also the ones who intimidated me most at school, so on an unconscious level I suppose I’m turning the tables on them.

I’m very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you’re painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.

The bottom line is that I like my first drafts to be blind, unconscious, messy efforts; that’s what gets me the best material.

Because I’ve been a full professor doing research and lecturing at the University of California, I didn’t have a lot of time to write, so I have always used my unconscious a great deal to do the really heavy lifting.

I’ve never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there’s nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there. It’s coming up out of my unconscious, up from places that I don’t even know where they are.

Lent is a time to renew wherever we are in that process that I call the divine therapy. It’s a time to look what our instinctual needs are, look at what the dynamics of our unconscious are.

At one point, I wrote 20 jokes a day, and I had a commitment to send them to the same three people. Now, I just write down what my husband says in his sleep. He’s the funniest person, even unconscious.

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.

My brother had fabulous children before I had children and for some reason I wanted to photograph them, and that was when I got my first camera. Children have something totally unconscious about them. That’s how I learned.

In all our perceptions, from vision to hearing, to the pictures we build of people’s character, our unconscious mind starts from whatever objective data is available to us – usually spotty – and helps to shape and construct the more complete picture we consciously perceive.

Modeling teaches you to be completely conscious of the camera. Acting is being totally unconscious of it.

I never felt like there was an unconscious part of me around that woke up or that came out of the closet; there wasn’t a struggle, there wasn’t an attempt to suppress.

The fans want to see more. They’re there to see fights, they want to see more, they want to see people get put unconscious, whatever. But you can’t get put in those spots.

A lot of time you write out of some unconscious place. I try to trust what is coming and where it wants to take me.

We are all at times unconscious prophets.

Of a truth, there is an inward, formless, inarticulate, almost unconscious, prayer, the very breath of love, whereby the soul is knit fast to the God whom it has tracked, amidst the tangled underwood of human life, to his covert on the eternal hills.

Art is a way of penetrating and going deep into our unconscious and creating amazing worlds – as the Greeks did, if you like, as did Ovid with his stories and his fantasies.

Mark this well, you proud men of action! you are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.

Sometimes we need pure relief. Sometimes we need pure escapism. Sometimes we need major reflection on some aspects of our collective unconscious.

The other thing in composition is opening up the unconscious.

The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature; its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos.

You have to draw on your unconscious when you make a film – you can’t worry about whether it’s costing a lot of money.

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.

I don’t think there is any kind of magic about what I do. All of the connections are there, somewhere in the subconscious or in the collective unconscious. If I let the elements speak to each other, then these coincidences will happen. And they do happen. They happen all the time.

I’ve never seen a truly great fighter get knocked onto the ropes unconscious… knocked out cold before… and I saw Roy Jones get knocked out twice in a row.

The un-conscious distortion of the facts is almost harmless compared to the unconscious neglect of an animal’s mental life until it verges on the unusual and marvelous.

I’ve always been interested in the intersection between our rational and our unconscious lives.

The point of psychoanalysis is to really understand the roots of your behavior. Understand why you are doing the things you’re doing – and connect your unconscious to your conscious.

I am an artist, you understand? For me, a picture is like poetry. When you make art, this is not coming from an intellectual place. It’s coming from the deep side of your unconscious, your soul.

Real obsession needs an unconscious motivation behind it.

I have an unconscious burglar living in my mind: If I read something, it’s mine.

How art works is really interesting. It comes from our unconscious, a lot of it. And were communicating in ways were not completely aware of when were making it.

Occasionally if I look back at something I’ve written I’ll find one of those that I don’t understand, but that’s a bad thing – the unconscious has dealt me a bad hand.

I think I’m drawn to female characters partly because they don’t have as easy or as obvious a relationship to power in society, and so they suffer under social constraints or have to maneuver within them in ways men sometimes don’t or are unconscious about, or have certain liberties that are invisible to them.

The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.

Every day I try to be in communication with the universe in an unconscious way.

The conscious mind determines the actions, the unconscious mind determines the reactions; and the reactions are just as important as the actions.

People often cover their mouths when lying. A hand on the mouth or even a touch of the lips shows you that they are lying because this unconscious body language represents a closing off of communication.

‘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.

I think humans are fascinating in general. We’re so weird. We do so many quirky things, and we don’t even know it. There’s just so many layers upon layers of nuances in everything we do, and the most fun part as an actor is trying to get into all those nuances, whether they’re conscious or unconscious.

I have this habit to bow my head, as to look shorter, maybe as a result of an unconscious demand of not taking up so much space.

The multilevel, the conscious and the unconscious, is natural when I write scripts, when I come up with ideas and stories.

‘Subliminal’ is about how we misinterpret our behavior because we’re unaware of what our unconscious minds are doing.

Some people talk about children wanting to be born as though somewhere out there in the collective unconscious there’s a spirit, or a thought or an idea that wants to be born. And I sometimes feel that way about stories… that they’re there and they want to be told.

For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it’s essential to be free.

I’m just trying to make a smudge on the collective unconscious.

I’ve fallen down crevasses, been bitten by snakes, been knocked unconscious, had various limbs broken and once, a heavy camera came plunging down which very nearly decapitated me.

I have a deep, deep belief that if I tell you I’m going to crack you with a clean shot to the chin inside one minute of the first round and you will be unconscious, well, then that’s what will happen.

More and more, unsolicited gifts from without are likely to be received with unconscious resentment.

What works for me is simply to read a lot of stuff throughout the year – not with a particular story or theme in mind, but just because you never know what might be useful or interesting in the long run. I much prefer to just absorb a lot of stuff and let the old unconscious chew down on it over time.

I’m not religious. I’m not an atheist. Would I say I’m an agnostic? Possibly. But I would say the collective unconscious is something I’m much more interested in.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

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.

It is inconceivable for our unconscious to imagine an actual ending of our own life here on Earth, and if this life of ours has to end, the ending is always attributed to a malicious intervention from the outside by someone else.

We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

I never know when somebody’s going to knock on the door of my own unconscious in a way that I wouldn’t have anticipated.

There are conscious reasons and unconscious reasons why I pick something. You know, I have to be moved by the story and usually that means it has to touch me in some kind of personal place.

I certainly think, obviously, rhythm is a huge part of being an actor. It just is unconscious, to a degree, but particularly in comedy, rhythm is pretty essential, and there’s probably something more physiological going on.

On the unconscious level, touch seems to impart a subliminal sense of caring and connection.

Laughter is a Trojan horse to enter into direct contact with the unconscious, strike the imagination, and trigger visceral reactions.

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.

There is a calculus, it turns out, for mastering our subconscious urges. For companies like Target, the exhaustive rendering of our conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and algorithms has revolutionized what they know about us and, therefore, how precisely they can sell.

The collective unconscious consists of the sum of the instincts and their correlates, the archetypes. Just as everybody possesses instincts, so he also possesses a stock of archetypal images.

I suppose I had always been an unconscious suffragist. With my temperament and my surroundings, I could scarcely have been otherwise.

I’ve always been fascinated by dreams – they seem like such intriguing evidence of the brain’s obsession with narrative as a form of sense-making. But because dreaming is an unconscious process, we have little control over the stories we tell, so they can be fraught with anxiety, vulnerability, and exposure.

It is my growing conviction that the Baptist churches in America are behind the age in missionary spirit. They now and then make a spasmodic effort to throw off a nightmare debt of some years’ accumulation, and then sink back into unconscious repose.

I’ve never been knocked unconscious in my entire career.

The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

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.

Feelings aroused by the touch of someone’s hand, the sound of music, the smell of a flower, a beautiful sunset, a work of art, love, laughter, hope and faith – all work on both the unconscious and the conscious aspects of the self, and they have physiological consequences as well.

The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.