Unconscious Quotes - Page 25

• Nature has a language of its own, or maybe those who have lived long in solitude read in it their own unconscious inner feelings and mysterious foreknowledge.

  Alexandra David-Neel

  Nature, Long, Solitude

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• So the dream is continually reminding us of the part which our conscious is forgetting. It does not speak with any absolute authority; it simply gives a true picture of a situation which exists in the unconscious. It speaks truth; but not, as some persons believe, the truth. It shows the other side.

  Frances G. Wickes

  Dream, Believe, Giving

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• Often we hate in others the thing which we fear in ourselves; or we hate because the other person raises to our consciousness some fault or inadequacy which we would prefer to have remain unconscious, and therefore without power to disturb our self-complacency.

  Frances G. Wickes

  Hate, Self, Complacency

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• Unhealthy families discourage individual expression. Everyone must conform to the thoughts and actions of the toxic parents. They promote fusion, a blurring of personal boundaries, a welding together of family members. On an unconscious level, it is hard for family members to know where one ends and another begins. In their efforts to be close, they often suffocate one another's individuality.

  Susan Forward

  Expression, Effort, Parent

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• It is a characteristic of any decaying civilization that the great masses of the people are unconscious of the tragedy. Humanity in a crisis is generally insensitive to the gravity of the times in which it lives. Men do not want to believe their own times are wicked, partly because it involves too much self-accusation and principally because they have no standards outside of themselves by which to measure their times.

  Fulton J. Sheen

  Believe, Men, Self

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• In any relationship we feel an unconscious need to create, as it were, a new picture, a new edition of ourselves to present to the fresh person who claims our interests; for them, we in a strange sense wish to, and do, start life anew.

  Ann Bridge

  Wish, Needs, Strange

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• your soul needs to be lonely so that its strangest elements can moil about, curl and growl and jump, fail and get triumphant, all inside you. Sociable people have the most trouble hearing their unconscious. They have trouble getting rid of clichés because clichés are sociable.

  Carol Bly

  Lonely, Loneliness, People

  Carol Bly (1990). “The passionate, accurate story: making your heart's truth into literature”

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• The contempt which men feel for the prostitute, and the fact that they have always regarded themselves as far superior to her, even when they made use of her, suggests an attempt to rationalize the situation; it might be explained as an unconscious transference to the woman of the shame they feel for themselves in these relations.

  Alison Roberta Noble Neilans

  Men, Use, Might

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• So many of the conscious and unconscious ways men and women treat each other have to do with romantic and sexual fantasies that are deeply ingrained, not just in society but in literature. The women's movement may manage to clean up the mess in society, but I don't know whether it can ever clean up the mess in our minds.

  Nora Ephron

  Men, Mind, Literature

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• But the sages of Greece and Rome turned aside from the awful spectacle, and, pursuing the ordinary occupations of life and study, appeared unconscious of any alterations in the moral of physical government of the world.

  Edward Gibbon

  Government, Rome, History

  Edward Gibbon, Francis Parkman, William H. Prescott, Theodore Roosevelt (2012). “The Modern Library Essential World History 4-Book Bundle: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Abridged); Montcalm and Wolfe; History of the Conquest of Mexico; The Naval War of 1812”, p.429, Modern Library

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• 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 Im inspired by the results.

  Louise Bourgeois

  Artist, Emotion, Inspired

  "My art is a form of restoration". Interview with Rachel Cooke, www.theguardian.com. October 14, 2007.

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• The purpose of technique is to free the unconscious. If you follow the rules ploddingly, they will allow your unconscious to be free.

  David Mamet

  Technique, Purpose, Ifs

  David Mamet (1991). “On Directing Film”, Penguin Group USA

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• The unconscious is structured like a language.

  Jacques Lacan

  Language

  "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud" (1957)

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• Besides, I can't get to where I want to go by conscious or unconscious suicide. I've got my strange little life to lead. Leading it the best I can - that's how I buy the ticket to where I want to be.

  Dean Koontz

  Suicide, Want, Littles

  Dean Koontz (2007). “Forever Odd: An Odd Thomas Novel”, p.87, Bantam

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• I prefer the gradual path My feeling is that mythic forms reveal themselves gradually in the course of your life if you know what they are and how to pay attention to their emergence. My own initiation into the mythic depths of the unconscious has been through the mind, through the books that surround me in this library. I have recognized in my quest all the stages of the hero's journey. I had my calls to adventure, my guides, demons, and illuminations.

  Joseph Campbell

  Book, Hero, Adventure

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• I write my first draft by hand, at least for fiction. For non-fiction, I write happily on a computer, but for fiction I write by hand, because I'm trying to achieve a kind of thoughtless state, or an unconscious instinctive state. 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.

  Jennifer Egan

  Reading, Writing, Hands

  Interview with Marah Eakin, www.avclub.com. May 12, 2011.

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• A sense of that kind of narrative movement that we experience online could have been in my mind easily, though not consciously. I do rely so much on my unconscious, the way I write my stuff the way I do. I let my unconscious work. I have better ideas that way and more interesting work.

  Jennifer Egan

  Writing, Ideas, Interesting

  Interview with Marah Eakin, www.avclub.com. May 12, 2011.

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• Black-and-white gives you that sort of parallel world. Also, it's very close to the condition of dreaming, to the unconscious.

  John Boorman

  Dream, Black And White, Giving

  Interview with Joshua Klein, www.avclub.com. January 20, 1999.

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• But when we start to focus in on what our own mind is up to, for instance, it is not unusual to quickly go unconscious again, to fall back into an automatic-pilot mode of unawareness. These lapses in awareness are frequently caused by an eddy of dissatisfaction with what we are seeing or feeling in that moment, out of which springs a desire for something to be different, for things to change.

  Jon Kabat-Zinn

  Spring, Fall, Focus

  Jon Kabat-Zinn (2005). “Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life”, Hyperion

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• 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

  Needs, Looks, Dynamics

  "Lent as Divine Therapy". Interview with Anne A. Simpkinson, www.beliefnet.com. February 2002.

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• Listen, if I heard shrieks and cries coming from a house and I ran in there and I found a great big broad shouldered whiskey soaked Joe weasel, dragging his wife about by the hair, and over here, two children are unconscious from his blows and kicks and another one screaming in terror, do you think I would apologize for being there? No! I'd knock 7 kinds of pork out of that old hog.

  Billy Sunday

  Children, Blow, Thinking

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• The struggle between God and man breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation. Most often this struggle is unconscious and short-lived. A weak soul does not have the endurance to resist the flesh for very long. It grows heavy, becomes flesh itself, and the contest ends. But among responsible men, men who keep their eyes riveted day and night upon the Supreme Duty, the conflict between flesh and spirit breaks out mercilessly and may last until death.

  Nikos Kazantzakis

  Struggle, Eye, Night

  Nikos Kazantzakis (2012). “The Last Temptation of Christ”, p.2, Simon and Schuster

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• He who is unconscious of the ties which connect him with every individual of his species feels no obligation to make sacrifices for their welfare or happiness.

  Benjamin Robbins Curtis

  Sacrifice, Ties, Welfare

  Benjamin Robbins Curtis, George Ticknor Curtis (1879). “A Memoir of Benjamin Robbins Curtis, LL. D.: Professional and miscellaneous writings”, Boston : Little, Brown,

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• Feelings aroused by the touch of someones 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.

  Bernie Siegel

  Beautiful, Art, Laughter

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• Subliminal is about how we misinterpret our behavior because were unaware of what our unconscious minds are doing.

  Leonard Mlodinow

  Mind, Behavior, Subliminal

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