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)
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
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>
— (Often misattributed, in part or in whole, to Booker T. Washington, Ambrose Bierce, Terry Pratchett, and the painter James Nicoll (1846–1918).)
…Jung even asserted that he would have no objection to regarding the psyche as a quality of matter and matter as a concrete aspect of the psyche, provided that the psyche was understood to be the collective unconscious.
marie-louise von franz— p. 40 (Creation Renewed & Reversed)
What after all, has maintained the human race on this old globe despite all the calamities of nature and all the tragic failings of mankind, if not faith in new possibilities, and courage to advocate them. Doubtless many times these new possibilities were declared by a man who, quite unconscious of courage, bore the "sense of being an exile, a condemned criminal, a fugitive from mankind." Did every one so feel who, in order to travel on his own proper path had been obliged to leave the traditional highway?
jane addams— Peace and Bread in Time of War, Chapter 7: Personal Reactions During War (1922)
[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
I would not want to be a politician... Let me tell you this: If I was campaigning, and I go against my opponent and he started attacking my character, and I leap over the table and choke him unconscious, would that help my campaign?
chuck norris— Chuck Norris' reply when asked if Walker the Texas Ranger could be president, in an interview by YouTube video
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
Poverty has a home in Africalike a quiet second skin.It may be the only place on earth where it is worn with unconscious dignity.
Bessie Head— 1989 Tales of Tenderness and Power.
It is the creative nature of man which has refused to let him lapse back into that unconscious unity with life which characterizes the animal world from which he made his escape.
— 1947 The Wisdom of the Heart,'Creative Death'.
Christianity was the temple that was to be eternal, and on it, as unconscious builders, men were laboring in all the ages from the creation.
cyrus david foss— Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 132.
The dilemma of traditional sex research lay in the unconscious, but unquestioningly assumed division into opposing drives and hereditary factors... The division into heterosexuality and homosexuality, into heterosexuals and homosexuals, is also an artifact 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 continuum and attempted to make analyses with the help of fundamentally different concepts.
— "Scientific ideologies in change: Fear of Homosexuality as an Intellectual Event," from The repressed sexes: Historical texts and commentaries on homosexuality, ed. J.S. Hohmann (Lollar: Achenbach, 1977), pp. 129-44
Number is therefore the most primitive instrument of bringing an unconscious awareness of order into consciousness; from it you can best tap the unconscious constellation. This probably why it is used in most mantic methods.
marie-louise von franz— Creation Myths (1995) 'Chains' (Genealogies), p. 326 Shambhala ISBN 0-87773-528-X
To sum up: numbers appear to represent both an attribute of matter and the unconscious foundation of our mental process. For this reason, number forms, according to Jung, that particular element that unites the realms of matter and psyche. It is “real” in a double sense, as an archetypal image and as a qualitative manifestation in the realm of outer-world experience.
marie-louise von franz— p. .52 (Creation Renewed & Reversed)
One wonders that there can be found a man courageous enough to occupy the post. It is a matter of meditation. Having given it a few minutes I come to the conclusion in the serenity of my heart and the peace of my conscience that he must be either an extreme megalomaniac or an utterly unconscious being.
joseph conrad— "The Censor of Plays" (1907)
The unconscious is selective, when it learns what to listen for.
— Chapter 12 (p. 200)
We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a "metamorphosis of the gods," i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science.
carl jung— p 110
Both artists and neurotics speak and live from the subconscious and unconscious depths of their society. The artist does this positively, communicating what he experiences to his fellow men. The neurotic does this negatively.
rollo may— Ch. 1 : Introduction : Our Schizoid World,p. 21
While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.
Marshall McLuhan— p. 52 ("The Agenbite of Outwit")
I wish I was more cheerful, it is more pleasant, Also it is a duty, we should smile as well as submitting To the purpose of One Above who is experimenting With various mixtures of human character which goes best, All is interesting for him it is exciting, but not for us. There I go again. Smile, smile, and get some work to do Then you will be practically unconscious without positively having to go.
stevie smith— "Thoughts about the Person from Porlock (continued)"
Understand then all of you, especially the young, that to want to impose an imaginary state of government on others by violence is not only a vulgar superstition, but even a criminal work. Understand that this work, far from assuring the well-being of humanity is only a lie, a more or less unconscious hypocrisy, camouflaging the lowest passions we posses.
leo tolstoy— Passage written for for The Law of Love and the Law of Violence (1908), released in 1917, as quoted in Equality in Liberty and Justice (2001) by Antony Flew, p. 89
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, in The Lyric: An Essay, p.35
[Milton Erickson] does not translate unconscious communication into conscious form. Whatever the patient says in metaphoric form, Erickson responds [matches] in kind. By parables, by interpersonal action, and by directives, he works within the metaphor to bring about change. He seems to feel that the depth and swiftness of that change can be prevented if the person suffers a translation of the communication.
— Haley, Uncommon therapy, 1973 + 1986, p. 28
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.
— Thomas Keating, in First Presbyterian Church
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 D. Nicoll (1990-05-15). "The King's English". rec.arts.sf-lovers. (Google Groups).
With his almost acid sharpness of insight , with his almost animal dexterity in act , there went none of that large, unconscious geniality of the world ’s heroes.
— Henry David Thoreau, in The Cornhill Magazine, 1880, p.665
The dilemma of traditional sex research lay in the unconscious, but unquestioningly assumed division into opposing drives and hereditary factors . . . The division into heterosexuality and homosexuality, into heterosexuals and homosexuals, is also an artifact that rests on a grave mistake, 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 continuum 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
