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Unconscious Quotes

We’ve collected the best Unconscious Quotes from the greatest minds of the world: Charles Olson, Lee Strasberg, Edward Bond, Janet Fitch, Louis Kronenberger. Use them as an inspiration.

1
This country has been unconscious, and it’s got to awake. That’s my belief.
Charles Olson
2
Acting isn’t something you do. Instead of doing it, it occurs. If you’re going to start with logic, you might as well give up. You can have conscious preparation, but you have unconscious results.
Lee Strasberg
3
Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human.
4
I use my fiction to explore my own unconscious issues. I usually don’t even know what’s going on with me until I’m writing. That doesn’t mean my books are autobiographical.
5
Individualism is rather like innocence; there must be something unconscious about it.
Louis Kronenberger
6
The other thing in composition is opening up the unconscious.
John Fahey
7
I had no desire to be a star. I wanted to be a character actress and be able to do all kinds of parts and work on a lot of things. That was my unconscious choice. I wanted to be an undercover actress.
Elizabeth Wilson
8
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.
9
I think there’s a value in people talking, it’s just that we’re in this culture now where everyone wants to ‘out’ each other at every moment, for their unconscious bias or whatever, and people then don’t feel free to just talk. Do you know what I mean?
10
Whether it’s a blatant homage or unconscious mimicry, the Rolling Stones have permanently, indelibly influenced how rock stars look and behave.
11
Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious.
12
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.
13
Symbolic violence is violence wielded with tacit complicity between its victims and its agents, insofar as both remain unconscious of submitting to or wielding it.
Pierre Bourdieu
14
The men of action are, after all, only the unconscious instruments of the men of thought.
15
On the unconscious level, touch seems to impart a subliminal sense of caring and connection.
16
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.
17
The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.
18
We are afraid of ourselves and our own unconscious minds. When we are building something that reflects us, it’s the one thing we’re all afraid to face. We’re afraid to face ourselves. Building machines that mirror our consciousness is a very frightening proposition because we have seen how evil people can be.
19
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.
20
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.
21
Sometimes it takes time to become part of the collective unconscious, just like ‘Fanboys’ did. Going into that movie, I said to myself that if you were a ‘Star Wars‘ fan, you were going to love that movie. It’s an homage to everything science-fiction, but especially ‘Star Wars.’
22
The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind.
23
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.
24
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.
25
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.
26
The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
27
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.
28
I’m just trying to make a smudge on the collective unconscious.
29
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.
John Drinkwater
30
Mark this well, you proud men of action! you are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.
31
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.
32
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.
33
We are all at times unconscious prophets.
34
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.
35
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.
36
If I didn’t forgive the people who took me into the barracks and beat me unconscious over a period of days during the period when the British state was indicted for inhuman and degrading treatment in 1971-72, or even the guys who shot me, if you don’t forgive them, you end up with unnecessary baggage.
37
The conscious mind determines the actions, the unconscious mind determines the reactions; and the reactions are just as important as the actions.
38
If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.
39
The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
40
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
41
Hypnosis is about shutting down the conscious mind and re-igniting the unconscious and the imagination, so while I give instructions to them under hypnosis, the contestants might interpret those instructions in all kinds of ways.
42
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
43
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.
44
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
45
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
46
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.
47
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.
48
The bottom line is that I like my first drafts to be blind, unconscious, messy efforts; that’s what gets me the best material.
49
Usually, I work every day, seven days a week. When I go three days without writing, my body aches with anxiety; my mood is irritable. My night dreams grow wild with unconscious invention.
50
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.
51
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.
52
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.
53
I am really quite fascinated by echo-locating bats and dolphins and have always wondered how sound affects the unconscious brain.
54
The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.
55
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.
56
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.
57
The unconscious is much smarter than the conscious.
58
I have a huge editor in my head who’s always making me miserable. But sometimes, I try to let my unconscious act out.
59
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.
60
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.
61
In these times – where social appearance is more important than spiritual substance – what has become our longing to change is really the unconscious desire to control not just the shape of our bodies (according to prevailing values) but to dominate our environment as well, regardless of the cost.
62
A liar often smiles subtly while telling a lie; it’s an unconscious expression of his delight in getting away with a whopper.
63
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.
64
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.
65
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.
66
Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
67
The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.
Margaret Walker
68
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
69
A slight daily unconscious luxury is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilization; like the gentle air of a genial climate, it is a perpetual minute enjoyment.
70
I’m not aware that I was consciously influenced by any director, though these things often happen unnoticed, submerged in the unconscious.
William Peter Blatty
71
The sheer number of paintings of unconscious women is distressing.
72
I feel like kids are the perfect psychic investigators of their parents, and kids understand their parents’ unconscious better than the parents ever do.
73
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.
Guillaume Canet
74
All psychological research is completely barred by the interpretations of the psychoanalysts. Everything happens in the unconscious, and I don’t know what this unconscious is.
Nathalie Sarraute
75
Animals praise a good day, a good hunt. They praise rain if they’re thirsty. That’s prayer. They don’t live an unconscious life, they simply have no language to talk about these things. But they are grateful for the good things that come along.
76
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.
77
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.
Peter Fraser
78
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.
79
Mirroring is simply repeating what someone just said. It creates more reception from the other side, it focuses attention, and it gives them an opportunity to dial in more with you and you to dial in more with them. It causes an almost completely unconscious response for the person to want to go on.
80
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.
81
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.
82
My specialties are corpses, unconscious people and people snoring in spectacular epics.
Gig Young
83
More and more, unsolicited gifts from without are likely to be received with unconscious resentment.
84
One of the things your unconscious mind does for you – and it’s a great gift – is it gives you extra courage to view the outer world and it does that by giving you an extra-special view of yourself.
85
‘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.
86
Every aspect of our lives plays out in two versions: one conscious, which we are constantly aware of, and the other unconscious, which remains hidden from us.
87
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
88
Sometimes we need pure relief. Sometimes we need pure escapism. Sometimes we need major reflection on some aspects of our collective unconscious.
89
Ideology has very little to do with ‘consciousness’ – it is profoundly unconscious.
Louis Althusser
90
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.
91
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.
92
The Haitian people are gentle and lovable except for their enormous and unconscious cruelty.
93
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.
James Nicoll
94
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
95
My daughter couldn’t wake me up, so they called 911. They rushed me to the hospital. They drilled a hole in my head and wrapped a coil around my brain. I was unconscious for a week, and I was in rehab for two months – couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk. Now I’ve relearned everything. I’m so happy.
96
A life lived of choice is a life of conscious action. A life lived of chance is a life of unconscious creation.
97
One thing that those who are in shape have in common is that we are restricting. When eating, we are choosing what we put in our bodies. This arrests unconscious eating.
98
In 1985, I was the host of a talk show, ‘Hot Properties on Lifetime.’ Hulk Hogan was on the show. He put me in a headlock and rendered me unconscious and let me fall to the ground. I split my head open and got nine stitches – and this was on live TV.
99
Games sometimes can reveal things. To watch someone in movement, unconscious movement, can be very stimulating and revealing, whether they win or not.
John Turturro
100
You could draw certain parallels between the structure of the Pompidou and the structure of the rocket-launching facilities at Cape Canaveral. They might not have been thinking about it, but I think there is some kind of unconscious affinity there.
Kenneth Frampton
101
Looking back at my career, I wish I knew then what I know now… that gender bias is built into the system, and it’s unconscious in many ways. I wish I had the maturity and courage to have pushed back more. I was always trying to be a ‘good girl‘ and play by the rules.
102
Ancient eschatological texts are actually maps of the inner territories of the psyche that seem to transcend race and culture and originate in the collective unconscious.
103
Prenatal education can only be an unconscious result of what the parents, particularly the mother, do. If, until the child is born, the mother acts in such a way that she expresses what is morally and intellectually correct, then what she accomplishes in her own continuing education will transfer to the child.
104
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
105
Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity.
106
I write because something inner and unconscious forces me to. That is the first compulsion. The second is one of ethical and moral duty. I feel responsible to tell stories that inspire readers to consider more deeply who they are.
107
I have an unconscious burglar living in my mind: If I read something, it’s mine.
David Eddings
108
Karate probably gave me an incredibly deep awareness of all the parts of me, my flexibility, and the nimble qualities I’m doing, even if they’re unconscious.
109
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.
110
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.
111
In my own life, I think legends of supernatural, mythic things are really just a manifestation of the collective unconscious. So I don’t really get freaked out. I mean certainly, you read about things people did to each other in the pursuit of some mystical or occult goal, and it’s horrifying. But that’s just human nature.
112
Our systems, perhaps, are nothing more than an unconscious apology for our faults, a gigantic scaffolding whose object is to hide from us our favorite sin.
113
There is nothing respecting which a man may be so long unconscious as of the extent and strength of his prejudices.
Francis Jeffrey
114
Real obsession needs an unconscious motivation behind it.
115
I’ve never been knocked unconscious in my entire career.
116
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.
117
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.
118
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.
Joseph C. Lincoln
119
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.
120
It’s hard to avoid ‘unconscious overclaiming.’ In unconscious overclaiming, we unconsciously overestimate our contributions relative to others. This makes sense, because we’re far more aware of what we do than what other people do. Also, we tend to do the work that we value.
121
Antarctica has this mythic weight. It resides in the collective unconscious of so many people, and it makes this huge impact, just like outer space. It’s like going to the moon.
122
The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally.
123
The truth is that our unconscious minds are active, purposeful, and independent. Hidden they may be, but their effects are anything but, for they play a critical role in shaping the way our conscious minds experience and respond to the world.
124
Scientific thought and the miraculous unconscious are two waves in the same ocean.
125
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.
126
Those who politically theorise the artificial concept of ‘whitenessinfer that anyone who has white skin cannot escape their unconscious bias. If you object, you are accused of failing to come to terms with your white privilege.
127
It’s my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel’s aesthetic facade.
128
To express your emotions, you have to be very loose and receptive. The unconscious will come to you if you have that gift that artists have. I only know if I’m inspired by the results.
Louise Bourgeois
129
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.
130
The only thing that interests me in music is to be able to reach into the, let’s call it, ‘collective unconscious’ of what is noblest in the human spirit, the way you find in the music of Mozart and Beethoven and Verdi that wonderful quality that not a note can be changed.
131
Kafka truly illustrates the way the environment oppresses the individual. He shows how the unconscious controls our lives.