Unconscious Quotes

I have never consciously boasted myself but from hereon I make a point not to even unconsciously undermine or degrade myself!

Ramana Pemmaraju

Perhaps it was as well that she had been unconscious for four weeks. She had missed the aftermath, the SO-1 reports, the recriminations, Snood and Tamworth's funerals. She missed everything...except the blame. It was waiting for her when she awoke...

Žižek seems to have got Hitchcock out of his system, if not out of his unconscious—one never does that.

Fredric Jameson

I find it very difficult to talk here now because I'm watching the sea all the time. The sea always makes me watch it all the time. I've spent hours and hours not just on the sea but just watching wave after wave come in. If it's an image of anything, I think it's an image of our own unconscious, the unconscious of our own minds... or you can put it the other way around, and that is that we have a sea in us. After all, we are sea creatures that learnt to walk on the land, are we not? And perhaps one way or another we go back to it. Every night when we dream we go back into that kind of depths, and that kind of beauty and monstrosity and mystery. So really the sea is not a single image, it can really image almost anything that the human mind can discover.

William Golding

The world is full of lots of people play acting and hurling stuff about, unconscious of the effects. And there are large group karmic things going on through history that none of us should ever take personally. Rushing about trying to rectify the sins of the past is not productive. The best you can do is to be present as the new you in the now, holding your light as a steady candle to add to the beam of calm and love now spreading to help wake more and more people up. Hopefully we will evolve as a species to eventually cease the unnecessary conflict between different groups of ourselves.

My cough is much worse at night and often prevents me from sleeping. It is not so much the daytime tiredness that I resent, but the inability to proceed uninter- rupted with my dreams, to run and play with my fancies, and, at last, in the early hours of the morning, to be visited with visions like a holy madman. The dreamer is like a Delian diver, fishing for pearls from the depths of our inner sea of knowledge; and I must have solved, or rather resolved, many more problems in my sleep than in my conscious hours.

I'll have to remember that for the future. When in a life-or-death battle, be sure to club unconscious everyone on your side as early on in the fight as possible," Laura said, laughing.

As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself…The critical issue is allowing yourself to know what you know. That takes an enormous amount of courage.

Bessel A. van der Kolk

Joe!” he groaned, attempting to speak clearly. “Joe! Good ol’ Joe!”“Captain, you’re drunk!” Lofflin said, stating the obvious while trying to keep his voice level. Blaine grinned at him lopsidedly and giggled, almost choking. He slapped the table, knocking his empty glass over.“Ye-ss, I am! Don’t ssup-pose you – think I co-uld ssit here an’ calmly wait t’die – dýou? Weee-ll, not ssob-er anyway. Ha ha ha.”Disgust and hopelessness were swelling inside him. He felt like punching that drunken face till it was either sober or unconscious.“Damn it, Captain! We need you – the crew needs you! You’re turning your back on them – in our most desperate time!

Christina Engela

If the conscious falls into the unconscious you fall into a coma, and if the unconscious falls into the conscious and becomes conscious itself, you become enlightened, you become a Buddha, a Sosan.

Osho

Your unconscious wants to express the pain you feel about your own lost innocence. But your ego wants to keep it repressed. To the compromise is anxiety.

The alchemist saw the union of opposites under the symbol of the tree, and it is therefore not surprising that the unconscious of present-day man, who no longer feels at home in his world and can base his existence neither on the past that is no more nor on the future that is yet to be, should hark back to the symbol of the cosmic tree rooted in this world and growing up to heaven - the tree that is also man. In the history of symbols this tree is described as the way of life itself, a growing into that which eternally is and does not change; which springs from the union of opposites and, by its eternal presence, also makes that union possible. It seems as if it were only through an experience of symbolic reality that man, vainly seeking his own “existence” and making a philosophy out of it, can find his way back to a world in which he is no longer a stranger.

C.G. Jung

We think consciously yet live life unconsciously!

Ramana Pemmaraju

Good people are not those who lack flaws, the brave are not those who feel no fear, and the generous are not those who never feel selfish. Extraordinary people are not extraordinary because they are invulnerable to unconscious biases. They are extraordinary because they choose to do something about it.

Shankar Vedantam

When you smile, I become unconscious and I cannot open my eyes. Where is the justice!

The disowned part of self is an energy - an emotion or desire or need, that has been shamed every time it emerged. These energy patterns are repressed but not destroyed. They are alive in our unconscious.

A misleading perception or false belief is increasingly being perpetuated that the unconscious or the intuitive is all that really matters in any spiritual endeavor, and that the conscious, rational, logical, analytical mind is the mortal enemy of spiritual awareness and soul growth.

Anthon St. Maarten

The acrid odor of overloaded circuitry permeated the air, the horrid smell witness that at least one of his senses was working as sights and sounds became one with the unknown. Eventually he collapsed to the floor, wondering if he'd wake up in mortality. Then the muddled spectra went black, the silence that followed only possible in the deepest sectors of space. Or death.

She knew she should say something profound, something beautiful in response. Instead, she spoke the truth. "If we make it out of here alive, I'm going to kiss you unconscious.

Thinking is like a fountain. Once it gets going at a certain pressure, well, it almost impossible to turn it off. And, my hat! what odd things come up with the water!("Out Of The Deep")

Walter de la Mare

When you go with first principles, a giant light goes off in what you think is a city and turns out to be an insane asylum.

Stefan Molyneux

A person can only see their shadow if they awaken their eclectic soul. Self-understanding commences by admitting to the shadowy presence of the primordial unconsciousness. The unconscious mind is a magical concoction of logical and irrational thoughts and feelings.

Kilroy J. Oldster

[B]y reinterpreting Freudianism in terms of language, a pre-eminently social activity, Lacan permits us to explore the relations between the unconscious and human society. One way of describing his work is to say that he makes us recognize that the unconscious is not some kind of seething, tumultuous, private region ‘inside’ us, but an effect of our relations with one another. The unconscious is, so to speak, ‘outside’ rather than ‘within’ us — or rather it exists ‘between’ us, as our relationships do.

Lacan, as we have seen in our discussion of Freud, regards the unconscious as structured like a language. This is not only because it works by metaphor and metonymy: it is also because, like language itself for the post-structuralists, it is composed less of signs — stable meanings — than of signifiers. If you dream of a horse, it is not immediately obvious what this signifies: it may have many contradictory meanings, may be just one of a whole chain of signifiers with equally multiple meanings. The image of the horse, that is to say, is not a sign in Saussure’s sense - it does not have one determined signified tied neatly to its tail - but is a signifier which may be attached to many different signifieds, and which may itself bear the traces of the other signifiers which surround it. (I was not aware, when I wrote the above sentence, of the word-play involved in ‘horse’ and ‘tail’: one signifier interacted with another against my conscious intention.) The unconscious is just a continual movement and activity of signifiers, whose signifieds are often inaccessible to us because they are repressed. This is why Lacan speaks of the unconscious as a ‘sliding of the signified beneath the signifier’, as a constant fading and evaporation of meaning, a bizarre ‘modernist’ text which is almost unreadable and which will certainly never yield up its final secrets to interpretation.

Most insensible, corrupt, cheap, disrespectful young girls run after bad, rude, cocky, nonsensical boys, but a mature, educated, thoughtful, virtuos lady opts for a wise, well breed, experienced, humble, modest gentleman.

Michael Bassey Johnson

Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.

Alain de Botton

Everything with no exception is a choice. The choice can be either conscious or unconscious depending on the level of self-awareness. The more self-aware we become, the faster we can make our unconscious choices known to us.

Raphael Zernoff

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 Schrödinger

If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.

Daniel C. Dennett

If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course never be able to speak coherently at all. If the whole of language were present to me when I spoke, then I would not be able to articulate anything at all. The ego, or consciousness, can therefore only work by repressing this turbulent activity, provisionally nailing down words on to meanings. Every now and then a word from the unconscious which I do not want insinuates itself into my discourse, and this is the famous Freudian slip of the tongue or parapraxis. But for Lacan all our discourse is in a sense a slip of the tongue: if the process of language is as slippery and ambiguous as he suggests, we can never mean precisely what we say and never say precisely what we mean. Meaning is always in some sense an approximation, a near-miss, a part-failure, mixing non-sense and non-communication into sense and dialogue.

In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the ‘imaginary’ level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis. The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it. There is a radical split between these two levels of being — a gap most dramatically exemplified by the act of referring to myself in a sentence. When I say ‘Tomorrow I will mow the lawn,’ the ‘I’ which I pronounce is an immediately intelligible, fairly stable point of reference which belies the murky depths of the ‘I’ which does the pronouncing. The former ‘I’ is known to linguistic theory as the ‘subject of the enunciation’, the topic designated by my sentence; the latter ‘I’, the one who speaks the sentence, is the ‘subject of the enunciating’, the subject of the actual act of speaking. In the process of speaking and writing, these two ‘I’s’ seem to achieve a rough sort of unity; but this unity is of an imaginary kind. The ‘subject of the enunciating’, the actual speaking, writing human person, can never represent himself or herself fully in what is said: there is no sign which will, so to speak, sum up my entire being. I can only designate myself in language by a convenient pronoun. The pronoun ‘I’ stands in for the ever-elusive subject, which will always slip through the nets of any particular piece of language; and this is equivalent to saying that I cannot ‘mean’ and ‘be’ simultaneously. To make this point, Lacan boldly rewrites Descartes’s ‘I think, therefore I am’ as: ‘I am not where I think, and I think where I am not.

People always want something more than immediate joy or that deeper sense called happiness. This is one of the secrets by which we shape the fulfillment of our designs. The something more assumes amplified power with people who cannot give it a name or who (most often the case) do not even suspect its existence. Most people only react unconsciously to such hidden forces. Thus, we have only to call a calculated something more into existence, define it and give it shape, then people will follow.

Our dreams and stories may contain implicit aspects of our lives even without our awareness. In fact, storytelling may be a primary way in which we can linguistically communicate to others—as well as to ourselves—the sometimes hidden contents of our implicitly remembering minds. Stories make available perspectives on the emotional themes of our implicit memory that may otherwise be consciously unavailable to us. This may be one reason why journal writing and intimate communication with others, which are so often narrative processes, have such powerful organizing effects on the mind: They allow us to modulate our emotions and make sense of the world.

Daniel J. Siegel

Living in the past is a conscious or an unconscious choice made through a connection to the past.

Cultivate the habit of making aware choice. Your choice makes your destiny. Do not be carried away by the unconscious choices.

Amit Ray

Traumatic events, by definition, overwhelm our ability to cope. When the mind becomes flooded with emotion, a circuit breaker is thrown that allows us to survive the experience fairly intact, that is, without becoming psychotic or frying out one of the brain centers. The cost of this blown circuit is emotion frozen within the body. In other words, we often unconsciously stop feeling our trauma partway into it, like a movie that is still going after the sound has been turned off. We cannot heal until we move fully through that trauma, including all the feelings of the event.

Susan Pease Banitt

The purpose of the false self is to defend against pain - not deal with reality

Robert W. Firestone

Most people do not erode their self-esteem over big issues but over small ones, little acts of betrayal and hypocrisy forgotten (repressed) very quickly. But the computer in your subconscious mind forgets nothing. It records your spiritual profit and loss. The balance sheet reflects your present level of self-esteem--and sends you the information via your emotions.

Nathaniel Branden

When people encounter the free market and they recoil or react negatively to it, they're merely confessing that voluntaryism, trade and negotiation are foreign and threatening to them, which tells you everything about how tragically they were raised.

Stefan Molyneux

A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying — to others and to yourself.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The unconscious is not a demoniacal monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgement go, is completely neutral. It only becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree that we repress it, its danger increases. But the moment the patient begins to assimilate contents that were previously unconscious, its danger diminishes. The dissociation of personality, the anxious division of the day-time and the night-time sides of the psyche, cease with progressive assimilation.

C.G. Jung

Man can be categorized into three levels on social strata: One who are Consciously Unconscious, second who are Unconsciously Conscious - while both are inter-dependent for their survival; the third by and large a rare breed, Consciously Conscious sect – who don’t ever relate to this world!

Ramana Pemmaraju

Whereas the health of an individual depends on the ego's regular descent and return to and from the unconscious, a society's longevity depends on actual people journeying into the unknown and returning with ideas.

The vast majority of people are unthinking prejudice machines.

Stefan Molyneux

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

Your belief about others creates an unconscious behavior pattern in you which creates the reality!

Harrish Sairaman

Truth has power. And if we all gravitate toward similar ideas maybe we do so because those ideas are true... written deep within us. And when we hear the truth, even if we don't understand it, we feel the truth, even if we don't understand it, we feel that truth resonate within us... vibrating with our unconscious wisdom. Perhaps the truth us not learned by us, but rather, the truth is re-called... re-membered... re-cognized... as that which is already inside us.

Dan Brown

Every mental process, or every mental action, that takes place in our wide-awake consciousness will, if it has depth of feeling or intensity, enter the unconscious field, and after it has developed itself according to the line of its original nature, will return to the conscious side of the mind.

Christian D. Larson

The only thing that science cannot discover is that we all have an unconscious Heart just like an unconscious mind. There comes a moment in our life when our mind and heart says one thing but still we do the other one because in our heart of hearts we know what we want. It is just that.. that we are still unaware of it and the unconscious heart knows it all.

Himanshu Chhabra

Some of your childhood traumas may be remembered with incredible clarity, while others are so frightening or incomprehensible that your conscious mind buries the memory in your unconscious.

Renee Fredrickson

Never give a conscious meaning to your unconscious acts!

Ramana Pemmaraju

The conscious mind and the unconscious mind jointly govern human beings’ desires, thoughts, and behavior, which unified totally in a singular human body houses what we term the self. The conscious mind frequently assist facilitate the agenda of the unconscious mind. Incompatible cravings of the conscious and unconscious mind generate tension and emotional turmoil, which can manifest itself in erratic behavior that produces self-doubt and self-questioning. One of the main conundrums of human beings is that the unconscious mind, which guides important aspects of human behavior and motivation, is virtually unknowable. The power of conscious thought – the ability to rationalize – misleads us into thinking we are primary logical entities, when we live most of our lives by unconsciously scanning external stimuli and reacting to events in real time without conscious reflection.

Kilroy J. Oldster

I am very confident. I look confident. I act confident. I speak in a confident way...

Milton H. Erickson

Seemingly minor yet persistent things penetrate the mind over time making it difficult to ever realize the impact; hence, though quite unfortunate, the most dangerous forms of corruption are those that are subtle and below the radar.

A flower blooms with all of her power and love to give you joy and to beautify this world. Is she conscious, unconscious, or super conscious?

Debasish Mridha

We are still living in a wonderful new world where man thinks himself astonishingly new and "modern." This is unmistakable proof of the youthfulness of human consciousness, which has not yet grown aware of its historical antecedents.

C.G. Jung

In the second place, however, history is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant — the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed. Thus history has proceeded hitherto in the manner of a natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that the wills of individuals — each of whom desires what he is impelled to by his physical constitution and external, in the last resort economic, circumstances (either his own personal circumstances or those of society in general) — do not attain what they want, but are merged into an aggregate mean, a common resultant, it must not be concluded that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to the resultant and is to this extent included in it.

Friedrich Engels

To be naive is to be unaware of how stupid and cruel other people are; but, by some definitions, ignorance is nearly the opposite of naivety in being a kind of cynicism, in being unaware of their intelligence and humanity. It seems to be a normal although unfortunate case that the great many of us consciously abhor ignorance in others yet subconsciously practice it ourselves: as naivety is apparent and well-known to inflict its damage upon oneself; whereas the alternative and the easier, ignorance, its damage upon others.

In his creative work the artist is dependent on sources and resources deriving from the spiritual unconscious.

Viktor E. Frankl

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.

1 2 Next