Unconscious Quotes
More Unconscious Quotes
Mass, time, magnetic moment, the unconscious: we have grown up with these symbolic concepts, so that we are startled to be told that man had once to create them for himself. He had indeed, and he has: for mass is not an intuition in the muscle, and time is not bought ready-made at the watchmaker's.
jacob bronowski— Science and Human Values, Part 2: "The Habit of Truth", §5 (1956, 1965, p. 35)
All humanity inspires me. Every passer-by is my unconscious sitter; and as strange as it may seem, I really draw folk as I see them. Surely it is not my fault that they fall into certain lines and angles.
aubrey beardsley— From an interview in the newspaper To-Day (1894), as quoted in Aubrey Beardsley : A Biography (1999) by Matthew Sturgis, p. 200
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. 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— Usenet article <1990May15.155309.8892@watdragon.waterloo.edu> (1990), updated in Usenet article (2003)
— (This observation is extensively quoted even outside of Usenet, and has appeared in textbooks. It has also been misattributed, in part and in whole, to Booker T. Washington, to Ambrose Bierce, to Terry Pratchett, and, in one case, to the painter James Nicoll (1846–1918).)
The "through-and-through" universe seems to suffocate me with its infallible impeccable all-pervasiveness. Its necessity , with no possibilities; its relations, with no subjects, make me feel as if I had entered into a contract with no reserved rights ... It seems too buttoned-up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast slow-breathing unconscious Kosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides.
william james— Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912), Ch. 12 : Absolutism and Empiricism
[Robinson Crusoe] is the true prototype of the British colonist. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy, the calculating taciturnity.
james joyce— James Joyce, “Daniel Defoe,” translated from Italian manuscript and edited by Joseph Prescott, Buffalo Studies 1 (1964): 24-25
Surely it is a matter of joy, that your faith in Jesus has been preserved; the Comforter that should relieve you is not far from you. But as you are a Christian, in the name of that Saviour, who was filled with bitterness and made druken with wormwood, I conjre you to have recourse in frequent prayer to 'his God and your God,' the God of mercies, and father of all comfort. Your poor father is, I hope, almost senseless of the calamity; the unconscious instrument of Divine Providence knows it not, and your mother is in heaven.
Charles Lamb— Letter from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Lamb, after the family tragedy.
Our patients are the ones who express and live out the subconscious and unconscious tendencies in the culture. The neurotic, or person suffering from what we now call character disorder, is characterized by the fact that the usual defenses of the culture do not work for him a generally painful situation of which he is more or less aware...
rollo may— Ch. 1 : Introduction : Our Schizoid World,p. 20
unconscious assumptions or opinions are the worst enemy of woman; they can even grow into a positively demonic passion that exasperates and disgusts men, and does the woman herself the greatest injury by gradually smothering the charm and meaning of her femininity and driving it into the background. Such a development naturally ends in profound psychological disunion, in short, in a neurosis.
carl jung— "Woman in Europe" (1927) In CW 10: Civilization in Transition. P.245
Gore is a man without an unconscious.
Italo Calvino— On friend and author Gore Vidal, as quoted in "GORE VIDAL, 1925-2012 : Prolific, Elegant, Acerbic Writer" in The New York Times (1 August 2012)
Under the shadow of earthly disappointment, all unconscious to ourselves, our Divine Redeemer is walking by our side.
edwin hubbell chapin— P. 584. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers)
I have closely studied the figured documents of all ages and of all the great masters, but I have never seen in them any representations of human beings walking on the extremity of the toes or raising the leg higher than the head. These ugly and false positions in no way express that state of unconscious Dionysiac delirium which is necessary to the dancer. Moreover movèments, just like harmonies in music, are not invented; they are discovered.
isadora duncan— As quoted in Modern Dancing and Dancers (1912) by John Ernest Crawford Flitch, p. 106
Discovery in mathematics is not a matter of logic. It is rather the result of mysterious powers which no one understands, and in which 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— Attributed in Chaplin, Virginia. "Princeton & Mathematics: A Notable Record". Princeton Alumni Weekly (May 9, 1958).
People’s lives are a direct reflection of the expectations of their peer group. … Your life experience will never far exceed the expectations of your peers, because to stay connected to them there is an unconscious contract that says we’re going to be within this range of each other. Now, on the other hand, if for some reason your friends have a higher expectation for life than you do, just to stay on the team you’ve got to raise your standard. And that's the beauty of life.
anthony robbins— At an Unleash the Power Within seminar, on video at The Next Level Newsletter (September 2005)
For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.
Matthew Arnold— Introduction to Ward's English Poets (1880).
No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels. Broadly, we can afford to sink those sorts of knowledge which continue to be true regardless of changes in the environment, but we must maintain in an accessible place all those controls of behavior which must be modified for every instance. The economics of the system, in fact, pushes organisms toward sinking into the unconscious those generalities of relationship which remain permanently true and toward keeping within the conscious the pragmatic of particular instances.
Gregory Bateson— p.143, as cited in: Lawrence S. Bale (1992) "Gregory Bateson’s Theory of Mind: Practical Applications to Pedagogy". November 1992. p.20
There is always an unconscious collaboration among artists.. ..the artist who imagine himself a Robinson Crusoe is either a primitive or a fool.
william baziotes— from his text for a symposium in 1954; as quoted in William Baziotes – paintings and drawings, ed. by Michael Preble, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 2004, p. 18
...a [literary] style can be a whole way of existing, so that you exist, for the moment, in perfect sympathy with it: you don’t read it so much as listen to it as it sweeps you along fast enough, often, to make you feel a blurred pleasure in your own speed. Often a phrase or sentence has the uncaring unconscious authority how else could you say it? that only a real style has.
Randall Jarrell— “An Unread Book”, p. 36
Although I have no objection to accepting the existence of relatively constant psychic contents that survive personal ego, it must always be born in mind that we have no way of knowing what these contents are actually like "as such." All we can observe is their effect on other living people, whose spiritual level and whose personal unconscious crucially influence the way these contents actually manifest themselves.
wolfgang pauli— "Modern Examples of Background Physics" ["Moderne Beispiele zur Hintergrundsphysik"] (1948) as translated by David Roscoe in Atom and Archetype (1992) edited by Carl Alfred Meier
In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means.
Arthur Schopenhauer— "On the Sufferings of the World"
The ascription of an unconscious intentional phenomenon to a system implies that the phenomenon is in principle accessible to consciousness.
john searle— A statement of the author’s “connection principle.”"Consciousness, Explanatory Inversion, and Cognitive Science," The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13, 4 (December 1990): 585-696.
Their [those with eating disorders'] task is to rescue themselves from a drive that is destroying them. Food embodies the false values that their own bodies refuse to assimilate, by which I mean that their bodies become edemic, bloated, allergic, or resort to vomiting the poison out. The unconscious body, and certainly the conscious body, will not tolerate the negative mother.
Marion Woodman— p. 15 (Addiction to Perfection (1982))
And still when the delicate and unconscious machinery of race relations slips, there will be murder again. How can law contradict the lives of millions of people and hope to be administered successfully?
richard wright— Native Son (1940, pg. 361)
But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me.
— Mark Twain, in a letter to Mrs. F. G. Whitmore (7 February 1907)
Every Central European family has its own stormy history in which family catastrophes and national catastrophes are mingled. History is more than erudition here, it is the inner meaning of actions, a validating tradition, a largely unconscious norm and parameter for conduct today.
— György Konrád
— Quoted in: Kumar, Krishan (2001). 1989: Revolutionary Ideas and Ideals.
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.
— Helen Fisher, in Sharing The Good Life, Prezi Inc., 15 November 2013
"The dilemma of traditional sex research lay in the unconscious, but unquestiongly assumed division into opposing drives and hereditary factors . . . The division into heterosexuality and homosexuality, into heterosexuals and homosexuals, is also an artefact that rests on a grave error, namely, on the assumption that a fundamentally different model is necessary to explain heteorsexual and homosexual behavior. The entire investigation of etiology was ideologically loaded beforehand because it separated a segment of the sexual contiuum and attempted to make analyses with the help of fundamentally different concepts."
— Rolf Gindorf, "Scientific ideologies in change: Fear of Homosexuality as an Intellectual Event", 1977
Judgement of what constitutes ‘effeminacy’ will, of course, be shaped by his or her culturally established views on gender roles. And, as is true for beauty , while one’s notions of masculinity and femininity may be culturally proscribed , ultimately any judgement as to what is beautiful or what is effeminate will be made on the basis of not only one’s surrounding culture or cultures but, subjectively, on the basis of complex internal factors, both conscious and unconscious.
— Roald Maliangkay, in The effeminacy of male beauty in Korea, Australian National University.
The dilemma of traditional sex research lay in the unconscious, but unquestiongly assumed division into opposing drives and hereditary factors. . . The division into heterosexuality and homosexuality, into hetersexuals and homosexuals, is also an artefact that rests on a grave error, namely, on the assumption that a fundamentally different model is necessary to explain heterosexual and homosexual behavior. The entire investigation of etiology was ideologically loaded beforehand because it separated a segment of the sexual contiuum and attempted to make analyses with the help of fundamentally different concepts.
— Rolf Gindorf, "Scientific ideologies in change: Fear of Homosexuality as an Intellectual Event", 1977
I only saw her as she pass'd A great, sad beauty, in whose eyes Lay all the loves of Paradise. . . . You shall not know her she who sat unconscious in my heart all time I dream'd and wove this wayward rhyme, And loved and did not blush thereat.
joaquin miller— IV, p. 25. (The Ship in the Desert (1875))
