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.