An Unconscious Mind Quotes & Sayings

Compartmentalization is an unconscious psychological defense mechanism employed to avoid cognitive dissonance. — Zack Love

Unconscious, perhaps, of the remote tendency of his own labours, he [Joseph Black] undermined that doctrine of material heat, which he seemed to support. For, by his advocacy of latent heat, he taught that its movements constantly battle, not only some of our senses, but all of them; and that, while our feelings make us believe that heat is lost, our intellect makes us believe that it is not lost. Here, we have apparent destructibility, and real indestructibility. To assert that a body received heat without its temperature rising, was to make the understanding correct the touch, and defy its dictates. It was a bold and beautiful paradox, which required courage as well as insight to broach, and the reception of which marks an epoch in the human mind, because it was an immense step towards idealizing matter into force. — Henry Thomas Buckle

He was keeping track of time. It was nearly two hours since he had last looked at his watch, but he knew what time it was to within about twenty seconds. It was an old skill, born of many long wakeful nights on active service. When you're waiting for something to happen, you close your body down like a beach house in winter and you let your mind lock onto the steady pace of the passing seconds. It's like suspended animation. It saves energy and it lifts the responsibility for your heartbeat away from your unconscious brain and passes it on to some kind of a hidden clock. Makes a huge black space for thinking in. But it keeps you just awake enough to be reach for whatever you need to be ready for. And it means you always know what time it is. — Lee Child

In Molecules of Emotion, Pert revealed how her study of information-processing receptors on nerve cell membranes led her to discover that the same "neural" receptors were present on most, if not all, of the body's cells. Her elegant experiments established that the "mind" was not focused in the head but was distributed via signal molecules to the whole body. As importantly, her work emphasized that emotions were not only derived through a feedback of the body's environmental information. Through self-consciousness, the mind can use the brain to generate "molecules of emotion" and override the system. While proper use of consciousness can bring health to an ailing body, inappropriate unconscious control of emotions can easily make a healthy body diseased, — Bruce H. Lipton

It is an emotional and an enchanted place. If the study of the conscious mind highlights the importance of reason and analysis, study of the unconscious mind highlights the importance of passions and perception. — David Brooks

People have little importance to me because they are unconscious to their real self. And that self that I see in them, they can't see in themselves. They're only manifesting a very small portion of what they could be. Honesty and kindness could unlock many things in their spirit but most people are too afraid and trapped within themselves, their mind, their fake beliefs. And so, I observe everything in them that they may spend an entire lifetime never seeing. I know their wants, their qualities, their dreams, their needs, their spiritual lessons, their karma, their past lives. They only know what their friends, trapped by the same ignorance, believe that they are. — Robin Sacredfire

An image is a bridge between evoked emotion and conscious knowledge; words are the cables that hold up the bridge. Images are more direct, more immediate than words, and closer to the unconscious. Picture language precedes thinking in words; the metaphorical mind precedes analytical consciousness. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

The unconscious compulsion to enhance one's identity through association with an object is built into the very structure of the egoic mind. — Eckhart Tolle

A room is not just a room. A room is a manifestation of a state of mind, the product of an intelligence. Either conscious ( ... ) or unconscious. We make our rooms, and then our rooms make us. — Will Wiles

The collective unconscious, the same as other transpersonal phenomena, is evidence that our mind is not an isolated entity but is constantly in touch with other minds as well as with the world around us. We are never entirely detached from the outside world; never entirely enclosed within our skin. Our mind and our body resonate with our environment, including other people in our environment. Our mind is coherent with the world, and when we do not repress the intuitions that link us with other people and with nature, we can become aware of our oneness with the universe. — James Oroc

A person employs human reason and intellect to guide our earthly expedition. We can stumble through life satisfying the unconscious dictates of the mind or take control of our life by increasing our level of conscious awareness. Philosophy always commences with an act of consciousness. We must follow our moral passions. We create our reality by what we perceive as truth. We imagine a life that we wish to experience. Live the life that you envision. Do not allow other people or external determinates to control your conception of the self, because otherwise you are living someone else's life. — Kilroy J. Oldster

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

Every isolated passion, is, in isolation, insane; sanity may be defined as synthesis of insanities. Every dominant passion generates a dominant fear, the fear of its non-fulfillment. Every dominant fear generates a nightmare, sometimes in form of explicit and conscious fanaticism, sometimes in paralyzing timidity, sometimes in an unconscious or subconscious terror which finds expression only in dreams. The man who wishes to preserve sanity in a dangerous world should summon in his own mind a parliament of fears, in which each in turn is voted absurd by all the others. — Bertrand Russell

Operating in an unlit world, the unconscious mind is a brilliant detective. — Jo Coudert

One of the things your unconscious mind does for you - and it's a great gift - is it gives you extra courage to view the outer world and it does that by giving you an extra-special view of yourself. — Leonard Mlodinow

Youatt gives an excellent illustration of the effects of a course of selection which may be considered as unconscious, in so far that the breeders could never have expected, or even wished, to produce the result which ensued - namely, the production of the distinct strains. The two flocks of Leicester sheep kept by Mr. Buckley and Mr. Burgess, as Mr. Youatt remarks, Have been purely bred from the original stock of Mr. Bakewell for upwards of fifty years. There is not a suspicion existing in the mind of any one at all acquainted with the subject that the owner of either of them has deviated in any one instance from the pure blood of Mr. Bakewell's flock, and yet the difference between the sheep possessed by these two gentlemen is so great that they have the appearance of being quite different varieties. — Charles Darwin

I find that daydreams are oftentimes similar in this respect to real dreams, the kind we experience in an unconscious state. Our mind puts together scenic imagery and simulated interactions in a seemingly designless, irregular, and often circuitous manner. We may think the substance of the dream is simply an agglomeration of thoughts, ideas, and experiences, but in truth, it may be pulling inspiration from somewhere deep down within. It may be the result of some unfulfilled desire, or possibly the expression of some dark hidden fear (like spiders or clowns). — J.W. Lord

I whispered into his ear, "Erik ... "
There was no response from him.
"Erik." My voice was a little bit firmer.
I pushed at his shoulders making sure that my hands were well away from his re-opened wound. He weighed more than I did. I couldn't get out from under him. God, I'm stuck inside of him ... like a dog.
"Erik."
I tried to wriggle out from under him. I grew hard. I stilled horrified as my body took pleasure in this situation. I tried to shift his leg over. I thrust into him. Oh ... I thrust again. I was hovering around the panic state but lust was driving all thoughts out of my mind. The more I struggled to free myself ... I fucked him.
I screwed an unconscious man. What kind of man was I? I couldn't stop. The thwap, thwap sound of me burying my full length inside him hammered at my head.
Don't do this ... don't do ... nnnngghgghhh. I came deep within him. — Derekica Snake

The mind's deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man's unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity. — Albert Camus

The universe consists primarily of dark matter. We can't see it, but it has an enormous gravitational force. The conscious mind - much like the visible aspect of the universe - is only a small fraction of the mental world. The dark matter of the mind, the unconscious, has the greatest psychic gravity. Disregard the dark matter of the universe and anomalies appear. Ignore the dark matter of the mind and our irrationality is inexplicable. — John Brockman

When you're dealing with these forces or powers in a philosophic and scientific way, contemplating them from an armchair, that rationalistic approach is useful. It is quite profitable then to regard the gods and goddesses and demons as projections of the human mind or as unconscious aspects of ourselves. But every truth is a truth only for one place and one time, and that's a truth, as I said, for the armchair. When you're actually dealing with these figures, the only safe, pragmatic and operational approach is to treat them as having a being, a will, and a purpose entirely apart from the humans who evoke them. If the Sorcerer's Apprentice had understood that, he wouldn't have gotten into so much trouble. — Robert Anton Wilson

An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical. And just as a democracy can die of too many lies, that kind of orthodoxy can kill us, too. — Bill Moyers

I don't think unfriending your old crush on Facebook will do much other than remove him from your Facebook feed. Don't beat yourself up over what you dream about; there are a lot worse things that could slip across the transom of your unconscious mind than an old high school crush who was always nice to you. — Mallory Ortberg

He was telling the students about the hypnotic technique of using quotes in a conversation. An idea is more palatable ... if it comes from someone else. The unconscious thinks in terms of content and structure. If you introduce a pattern with the words, 'My friend was telling me,' the critical part of her mind shuts off. — Neil Strauss

But how?" my students ask. "How do you actually do it?"
You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on the computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and stare at the paper again. Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind
a scene, a locale, a character, whatever
and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what that landscape or character has to say above the other voices in your mind. — Anne Lamott

Introspection makes our conscious motives and strategies transparent to us, while we have no sure means of deciphering them in others. Yet we never genuinely know our true selves. We remain largely ignorant of the actual unconscious determinants of our behavior, and therefore we cannot accurately predict what our behavior will be in circumstances beyond the safety zone of our past experience. The Greek motto "Know thyself," when applied to the minute details of our behavior, remains an inaccessible ideal. Our "self" is just a database that gets filled in through our social experiences, in the same format with which we attempt to understand other minds, and therefore it is just as likely to include glaring gaps, misunderstandings, and delusions. — Stanislas Dehaene

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

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

The child's mind is not the type of mind we adults possess. If we call our type of mind the conscious type, that of the child is an unconscious mind. Now an unconscious mind does not mean an inferior mind. An unconscious mind can be full of intelligence. One will find this type of intelligence in every being, and every insect has it. — Maria Montessori

Mind, in the way I use the word, is not just thought. It includes your emotions as well as all unconscious mental-emotional reactive patterns. Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body's reaction to your mind - or you might say, a reflection of your mind in the body. For example, an attack thought or a hostile thought will create a buildup of energy in the body that we call anger. The body is getting ready to fight. The thought that you are being threatened, physically or psychologically, causes the body to contract, and this is the physical side of what we call fear. Research has shown that strong emotions even cause changes in the biochemistry of the body. These biochemical changes represent the physical or material aspect of the emotion. Of course, you are not usually conscious of all your thought patterns, and it is often only through watching your emotions that you can bring them into awareness. — Eckhart Tolle

A Course in Miracles rightly points out that, whenever you are unhappy, there is the unconscious belief that the unhappiness "buys" you what you want. If "you" - the mind - did not believe that unhappiness works, why would you create it? The fact is, of course, that negativity does not work. Instead of attracting a desirable condition, it stops it from arising. Instead of dissolving an undesirable one, it keeps it in place. Its only "useful" function is that it strengthens the ego, and that is why the ego loves it. — Eckhart Tolle

Kestrel let the words echo in her mind. There had been a supple strength to his voice. An unconscious melody. Kestrel wondered if Arin knew how he exposed himself as a singer with every simple, ordinary word. She wondered if he meant to hold her in thrall. — Marie Rutkoski

I'm back in the basement of the Ascension Catholic Church, Francisco. And Little Suzie is here. She's lying on an alter, and they're hurting her. The bastards. They're hurting her. There is blood all over the place. There are candles burning and people chanting." I could hardly believe what I was seeing and I cried out, "What is this? I don't understand. What the hell is this?"
"Ask your unconscious mind to tell you, Suzie," he responded, ever so gently. "Ask."
I did ask. And the answer swept over me with a force so strong that I felt as if I had been knocked backward.
"Lord! Oh, Lord. This is satanic ritual abuse, Francisco. That's what this is! That's what this is!" I screamed. "Satanic ritual abuse. And they're using Little Suzie as part of their goddamned ritual.
p150 — Suzie Burke

The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter - in the eye. — Charlotte Bronte

You may not yet be able to bring your unconscious mind activity into awareness as thoughts, but it will always be reflected in the body as an emotion, and of this you can become aware. — Eckhart Tolle

Does evil come from inside ,from the dark depths of the human soul or does it come from outside ,from the objective conditions of human life?
This question divides all people into two large groups: believers and materialists. For believers all evil and good is in man. Hence denying violence because it's directed toward the outside, is a fight with an imaginary, nonexistent evil. Violence should be directed toward ourselves, inside, in the form of repentance or asceticism.
To assert that evil is outside, that a man is evil because the conditions in which he lives are bad, that changes in these conditions would bring changes in man,to insist that man is a result of outside circumstances, is from the religious point of view the most godless and the most inhuman idea which has ever appeared in the human mind. Such an opinion degrades man to a thing, to a helpless executor of outside, mechanical, unconscious forces. — Alija Izetbegovic

When the contents of the collective unconscious become activated, they have an unsettling effect on the conscious mind of everyone. When this psychic dynamic is not consciously metabolized, not just within an individual but collectively, the mental state of the people as a whole might well be compared to a psychosis. — Paul Levy

The very power of [textbook writers] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is 'doing' his 'English prep' and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all. — C.S. Lewis

I'm not a wildly gifted person; I don't play an instrument or speak another language or have great accomplishments in another field, as many writers do. But writing feels natural to me; the act of it seems to free up my unconscious, so that sometimes I feel that I have access to more ideas and information than my conscious mind could think up. — Jennifer Egan

Bunnu was no amateur when it came to escape. And even in his drowsiest moments, he understood implicitly that to forget his circumstances, even for a short while, meant first to forget himself. Who he was and why he was - to strip it all bare and start from scratch, as it were. In his nearly 250 years of life and, now, as an old emaciated man completely estranged from his family and closest friends - albeit more by circumstance than by choice - he understood the importance of this process and revered it, for there were far greater things to be done and achieved in the dark, uncertain areas of existence than in those circumscribed - and thereby strained - by comprehensibility. — Ashim Shanker

Cognitive science has something of enormous importance to contribute to human freedom: the ability to learn what our unconscious conceptual systems are like and how our cognitive unconscious functions. If we do not realize that most of our thought is unconscious and that we think metaphorically, we will indeed be slaves to the cognitive unconscious. Paradoxically, the assumption that we have a radically autonomous rationality as traditionally conceived actually limits our rational autonomy. It condemns us to cognitive slavery - to an unaware and uncritical dependence on our unconscious metaphors. To maximize what conceptual freedom we can have, we must be able to see through and move beyond philosophies that deny the existence of an embodied cognitive unconscious that governs most of our mental lives. — George Lakoff

I have an unconscious burglar living in my mind: If I read something, it's mine. — David Eddings

And gradually his memory slipped a little, as memories do, even those with so much love attached to them; as if there is an unconscious healing process within the mind which mends up in spite of our desperate determination never to forget. — Colleen McCullough

Our mind has its history, just as our body has its history. You might be just as astonished that man has an appendix, for instance. Does he know he ought to have an appendix? He is just born with it ... Our unconscious mind, like our body, is a storehouse of relics and memories of the past. A study of the structure of the unconscious collective mind would reveal the same discoveries as you make in comparative anatomy. We do not need to think that there is anything mystical about it. — Carl Jung

And then, some morning in the second week, the mind wakes, comes to life again. Not in a city sense - no - but beach-wise. It begins to drift, to play, to turn over in gentle careless rolls like those lazy waves on the beach. One never knows what chance treasures these easy unconscious rollers may toss up, on the smooth white sand of the conscious mind; what perfectly rounded stone, what rare shell from the ocean floor. Perhaps a channeled whelk, a moon shell, or even an argonaut. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Eventually man, too, found his way back to the sea. Standing on its shores, he must have looked out upon it with wonder and curiosity, compounded with an unconscious recognition of his lineage. He could not physically re-enter the ocean as the seals and whales had done. But over the centuries, with all the skill and ingenuity and reasoning powers of his mind, he has sought to explore and investigate even its most remote parts, so that he might re-enter it mentally and imaginatively. — Rachel Carson

Human being's possess the cognitive ability to survey and study the biological and cultural constraints that influence us in order to gain an enhanced understanding of who each of us are. Comprehension of what comprises a self allows human beings to monitor and regulate their thoughts and actions and therefore revise and modify their sense of self. How much conscious control we assert over our minds as well as what decisions through default we leave essentially unregulated and in the sole providence of the unconscious mind determines our self-identity. Self-identity in turns affects personal decision-making, which alters our external world. The combined impact of millions of people making conscious choices exerts a profound impact upon reality, the physical world that is constantly in flux. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Truth often finds its way to the mind close muffled in robes of sleep, and then speaks with uncompromising directness of matters in regard to which we practise an unconscious self-deception during our waking moments. — Jack London

Another aspect of the emotional pain that is an intrinsic part of the egoic mind is a deep-seated sense of lack or incompleteness, of not being whole. In some people, this is conscious, in others unconscious. If it is conscious, it manifests as the unsettling and constant feeling of not being worthy or good enough. If it is unconscious, it will only be felt indirectly as an intense craving, wanting and needing. In either case, people will often enter into a compulsive pursuit of ego-gratification and things to identify with in order to fill this hole they feel within. So they strive after possessions, money, success, power, recognition, or a special relationship, basically so that they can feel better about themselves, feel more complete. But even when they attain all these things, they soon find that the hole is still there, that it is bottomless. Then they are really in trouble, because they cannot delude themselves anymore. Well, they can and do, but it gets more difficult. — Eckhart Tolle

The power of understanding symbols, i.e. of regarding everything about a sense-datum as irrelevant except a certain form that it embodies, is the most characteristic mental trait of mankind. It issues in an unconscious, spontaneous process of abstraction, which goes on all the time in the human mind: a process of recognizing the concept in any configuration given to experience, and forming a conception accordingly. That is the real sense of Aristotle's definition of Man as "the rational animal". — Susanne Katherina Langer

People are so immersed in a deep sleep, so unconscious of their actions, that they can't realize that they decide to call me and send me messages when I'm busy an unable to answer. Furthermore, it's in these and only these moments, that I receive dozens of messages in the exact same day, reason why I don't answer any of them. In their egotistical mind, I'm selfish and ignoring them. They can't see that they're the egotistical and selfish ones. — Robin Sacredfire

But the unconscious is also feared by those whose conscious attitude is at odds with their true nature. Naturally their dreams will then assume an unpleasant and threatening form, for if nature is violated she takes her revenge. In itself the unconscious is neutral, and its normal function is to compensate the conscious position. In it the opposites slumber side by side; they are wrenched apart only by the activity of the conscious mind, and the more one-sided and cramped the conscious standpoint is, the more painful or dangerous will be the unconscious reaction. There — C. G. Jung

If you think in terms of teaching as a shared journey of discovery, instead of just a job, look what's involved: sharing of knowledge, hunger for understanding, desire for approval, opening of another spirit, penetration of one mind into another, the mystery of the unknown, the pleasure of success, mental intimacy in shared moments of revelation, maybe even climactic moments... Internal changes, growth, expansion, opening, tapping into unconscious longings-well, most of those words describe an erotic relationship. If you hung them all on a clothesline and picked only three, you'd have enough to produce a spark, a thin column of smoke, maybe even a small flame. — Jacquie Gordon