Unconscious Quotes - Page 27

• People today read less, take fewer museum trips, and attend fewer concerts. Is that because these activities aren't as fun? The decline... can be traced, at least in part, to unconscious stimuli that make us live faster.

  Frank Partnoy

  Fun, Museums, People

  Frank Partnoy (2012). “Wait: The useful art of procrastination”, p.56, Profile Books

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• Analysis helps patients put their unconscious procedural memories and actions into words and into context, so they can better understand them.

  Norman Doidge

  Memories, Analysis, Action

  Norman Doidge (2007). “The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science”, p.229, Penguin

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• If you notice an unconscious fantasy coming up within you, you would be wise not to interpret it at once. Do not say that you know what it is and force it into consciousness. Just let it live with you, leaving it in the half-dark, carry it with you and watch where it is going or what it is driving at.

  Marie-Louise von Franz

  Wise, Dark, Leaving

  Marie-Louise von Franz (2017). “The Interpretation of Fairy Tales: Revised Edition”, p.107, Shambhala Publications

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• Jokes often arise involuntarily, like dreams, and tend to be swiftly forgotten. From these similarities Freud inferred that jokes and dreams share a common origin in the unconscious. Both are essentially means of outwitting our inner 'censor'.

  Jim Holt

  Dream, Mean, Common

  Jim Holt (2008). “Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes”, p.70, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Stories are best when they 'emerge' from the depths, and when built in a painting from early sketch through the three-act process to The End, it is a perfect pathway to the unconscious stories set in our dreamwork.

  Billy Cannon

  Perfect, Pathways, Depth

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• 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

  Plot, Literature, Conscious

  "Laws of Media: The New Science". Book by Marshall McLuhan, co-written with Eric McLuhan, p. 52, 1988.

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• [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

  Persistence, Independence, Apathy

  "Daniel Defoe". Book by James Joyce, translated from Italian manuscript and edited by Joseph Prescott, pp. 24-25, 1964.

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• The unconscious mind writes poetry if it's left alone.

  Stephen King

  Writing, Mind, Left Alone

  Stephen King (2008). “Duma Key: A Novel”, p.56, Simon and Schuster

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• Until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Dust, Mind, Principles

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (2015). “Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Top Complete Works Collection”, p.432, 谷月社

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• 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

  Mother, Mean, Eating Disorder

  "Addiction to Perfection". Book by Marion Woodman, 1982.

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• 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

  Ideas, World, Today

  Matthew Arnold (1961). “Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold”, Houghton Mifflin College Division

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• 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

  Men, Race, Order

  Jane Addams (2010). “Peace and Bread in Time of War”, p.85, University of Illinois Press

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• In organized groups such as the army or the Church there is either no mention of love whatsoever between the members, or it is expressed only in a sublimated and indirect way, through the mediation of some religious imagine in the love of whom the members unite and whose all-embracing love they are supposed to imitate in their attitude towards each other. It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends.

  Theodor Adorno

  Religious, Attitude, Army

  "Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda". "The Essential Frankfurt School Reader", 1982.

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• 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

  Breathing, White, Rights

  "Essays in Radical Empiricism". Book by William James, Ch. 12 : Absolutism and Empiricism, 1912.

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• We lost not only through death, but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on. And our losses include not only our separations and departures from those we love, but our conscious and unconscious losses of romantic dreams, impossible expectations, illusions of freedom and power, illusions of safety -- and the loss of our own younger self, the self that thought it would always be unwrinkled and invulnerable and immortal.

  Judith Viorst

  Letting Go, Dream, Moving

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• 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

  Christian, Mother, Jesus

  Charles Lamb, Mary Lamb (1935). “The Letters of Charles Lamb: To which are Added Those of His Sister, Mary Lamb. Edited by E.V. Lucas”

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• 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

  Men, Intuition, Made

  Jacob Bronowski (1965). “Science and Human Values”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• 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

  Levels, Matter, Facts

  "Steps to an Ecology of Mind". Book by Gregory Bateson, 1972.

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• [W]earisome as it may seem, women must realize that, in making a commitment to a man, they have merged in his unconscious with his mother and have therefore inherited the ambivalence of that relationship.

  Camille Paglia

  Mother, Commitment, May

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Vamps & Tramps: New Essays”, p.46, Vintage

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• 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

  Spiritual, Psychics, Knowing

  "Atom and Archetype" edited by Carl Alfred Meier, translated by David Roscoe, 1992.

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• It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends.

  Theodor Adorno

  Political, Energy, Levels

  Theodor W Adorno (2005). “The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture”, p.137, Routledge

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• Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.

  Antonin Artaud

  War, Poetry, Drug

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.122, Grove Press

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• How thrilling to discover one had depths, how consoling to find them less polluted than the shallows, how encouraging to identify the enemy not as a fissure in the will but as a dead fetus in the specimen jar of the unconscious. My attention was being paternally led away from the excruciating present to the happy, healthy future that would be enabled by an analysis of the sick past, as though the priest had nothing to do but study old books and make bright forecasts, the present not worthy of notice.

  Edmund White

  Book, Past, Sick

  "A Boy's Own Story". Book by Edmund White, 1982.

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• We're vulnerable to repeating history, especially if we don't know what's driving us. For example, it may be a family tradition to marry someone with addiction problems, or who is an injured bird in need of caretaking. Or, you may be drawn to guys who remind you of your distant, unavailable father -- or your ill-tempered mother -- with the unconscious belief that you can take an old story, and through the power of your love, give it a new, happy ending.

  Harriet Lerner

  Mother, Father, Giving

  "The Top 10 Reasons Women Re-Marry The Wrong Guys" by Harriet Lerner, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 7, 2012.

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• The Superego, in censoring the unconscious and in implanting conscience, also censors the censor.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Superego, Censoring, Conscience

  Herbert Marcuse (2012). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.76, Beacon Press

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