Quotes about subconscious

A collection of quotes on the topic of subconscious, mind, use, thinking.

Quotes about subconscious

“Poetry is a lyrical insinuation. Often, its melodic subtlety kisses the subconscious mind.”

Masiela Lusha (1985) Albanian actress, writer, author

LaGuardia, Gina (October 2004). "Masiela's Musings". College Bound Teen (USA): p. 2.

Kiss

“As you sow in your subconscious mind, so shall you reap in your body and environment.”

Joseph Murphy (1898–1981) American writer

Source: The Power of Your Subconscious Mind -

“We suppress, reject, deny and disown the aspects that make us vulnerable or get us disapproved of in the world. By doing this, they become subconscious. They are buried outside of our awareness and we don't know they even exist, even though they tend to be visible to other people around us.”

Teal Swan (1984) American spiritual teacher

World, Making love, People

“Julian once wrote that coincidences are the scars of fate. There are no coincidences, Daniel. We are puppets of our subconscious desires.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

Fate

“Nothing comes from without; all things come from within - from the subconscious”

Neville Goddard (1905–1972) American author and lecturer

Source: Resurrection

“Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or
perhaps of subconsciousness—I wouldn't know. But I am
sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.”

Aaron Copland (1900–1990) American composer, composition teacher, writer, and conductor

“In infancy I was afraid of the dark, which I peopled with all sorts of things; but my grandfather cured me of that by daring me to walk through certain dark parts of the house when I was 3 or 4 years old. After that, dark places held a certain fascination for me. But it is in dreams that I have known the real clutch of stark, hideous, maddening, paralysing fear. My infant nightmares were classics, & in them there is not an abyss of agonising cosmic horror that I have not explored. I don't have such dreams now—but the memory of them will never leave me. It is undoubtedly from them that the darkest & most gruesome side of my fictional imagination is derived. At the ages of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, & 8 I have been whirled through formless abysses of infinite night and adumbrated horrors as black & as seethingly sinister as any of our friend Fafhrd's [a nickname Lovecraft used for Fritz Leiber] "splatter-stencil" triumphs. That's why I appreciate such triumphs so keenly, I have seen these things! Many a time I have awaked in shrieks of panic, & have fought desperately to keep from sinking back into sleep & its unutterable horrors. At the age of six my dreams became peopled with a race of lean, faceless, rubbery, winged things to which I applied the home-made name of night-gaunts. Night after night they would appear in exactly the same form—& the terror they brought was beyond any verbal description. Long decades later I embodied them in one of my Fungi from Yuggoth pseudo-sonnets, which you may have read. Well—after I was 8 all these things abated, perhaps because of the scientific habit of mind which I was acquiring (or trying to acquire). I ceased to believe in religion or any other form of the supernatural, & the new logic gradually reached my subconscious imagination. Still, occasional nightmares brought recurrent touches of the ancient fear—& as late as 1919 I had some that I could use in fiction without much change. The Statement of Randolph Carter is a literal dream transcript. Now, in the sere & yellow leaf (I shall be 47 in August), I seem to be rather deserted by stark horror. I have nightmares only 2 or 3 times a year, & of these none even approaches those of my youth in soul-shattering, phobic monstrousness. It is fully a decade & more since I have known fear in its most stupefying & hideous form. And yet, so strong is the impress of the past, I shall never cease to be fascinated by fear as a subject for aesthetic treatment. Along with the element of cosmic mystery & outsideness, it will always interest me more than anything else. It is, in a way, amusing that one of my chief interests should be an emotion whose poignant extremes I have never known in waking life!”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Harry O. Fischer (late February 1937), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 416-417
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life, People, Youth, Age

“I love reading books. In fact I have so many books at home that my mom has asked me not to purchase anymore. I feel books give a lot of knowledge and allow us to think from different perspectives. My all time favourite books are What I Know For Sure by Oprah Winfrey and The Power of your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy. I like to read from fiction to philosophical all of them. The last book I finished reading was Adultery by Paulo Coelho.”

Sukirti Kandpal (1987) Indian actress

Sukirti Kandpal on #WorldBookDay http://www.tellychakkar.com/tv/features/worldbookday-tv-celebs-and-their-love-reading-150423/

Love, Books, Feeling, Home

“As for the "religious" arguments for the annexation of the territories—these are only an expression, subconsciously or perhaps even overtly hypocritical, of the transformation of the Jewish religion into a camouflage for Israeli nationalism. Counterfeit religion identifies national interests with the service of God and imputes to the state—which is only an instrument serving human needs—supreme value from a religious standpoint.”

Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903–1994) israeli intellectual

"The Territories" (1968)

God, Religion

“All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.”

Thelonious Monk (1917–1982) American jazz pianist and composer

Interview in Down Beat magazine (28 October 1971)

“Smell is a strange sight. It evokes sentimental landscapes through a sudden sketching of the subconscious.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid., p. 238
The Book of Disquiet
Original: O olfacto é uma vista estranha. Evoca paisagens sentimentais por um desenhar súbito do subconsciente.

“I get 0.5 seconds to react to a ball, sometimes even less than that. I can't be thinking of what XYZ has said about me. I need to surrender myself to my natural instincts. My subconscious mind knows exactly what to do. It is trained to react. At home, my family doesn't discuss media coverage.”

Sachin Tendulkar (1973) A former Indian cricketer from India and one of the greatest cricketers ever seen in the world

Family, Home, Nature, Thinking

“Self-mastery is attained when the imagination has been directed and trained to conform with our desires-for although, in one sense, the imagination is inclined in the subconscious, yet it dominates the latter, and therefore, if we know how to guide it, our subconscious self will take charge of our material being and do its work just as we wish it to be done; or, in other words, exactly in conformity with our conscious suggestions.”

Emile Coué (1857–1926) French psychologist and pharmacist

Source: Autosuggestion : My method (2014), Chapter II. The role of imagination.

Imagination, Sense, Training

“The square is not a subconscious form. It is the creation of intuitive reason. The face of the new art. The square is a living, regal infant. The first step of pure creation in art.”

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) Russian and Soviet artist of polish descent

Quote in 'From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting', Kazimir Malevich, November 1916
1910 - 1920

Art

“A leader or a man of action in a crisis almost always acts subconsciously and then thinks of the reasons for his action.”

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) Indian lawyer, statesman, and writer, first Prime Minister of India

On Mahatma Gandhi
Autobiography (1936; 1949; 1958)
Context: I knew that Gandhiji usually acts on instinct (I prefer to call it that than the "inner voice" or an answer to prayer) and very often that instinct is right. He has repeatedly shown what a wonderful knack he has of sensing the mass mind and of acting at the psychological moment. The reasons which he afterward adduces to justify his action are usually afterthoughts and seldom carry one very far. A leader or a man of action in a crisis almost always acts subconsciously and then thinks of the reasons for his action.

Thinking

“I shall tell you where we are. We're in the most extreme and utter region of the human mind. A dim, subconscious underworld. A radiant abyss where men meet themselves. Hell, Netley. We're in Hell.”

Alan Moore book From Hell

Source: From Hell

Men, Hell

“I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

Letter to Ed White (5 July 1950) as published in The Missouri Review, Vol. XVII, No. 3, 1994, page 137, and also quoted in Jack Kerouac: Angelheaded Hipster (1996) by Steve Turner, p. 117

Money, Understanding, Fish

“Hunches [are] just messages from the subconscious, which [is] thinking furiously all the time and processing information we have not consciously noted.”

Dean Koontz book Intensity

Source: Intensity

Thinking, Time

“Hasn't it ever occurred to you that in your promiscuous pursuit of women you are merely trying to assuage your subconscious fears of sexual impotence?"
"Yes, sir, it has."
"Then why do you do it?"
"To assuage my fears of sexual impotence.”

Joseph Heller book Catch-22

Source: Catch 22

Women, Fear

“Whatever we plant in our subconscious mind and nourish with repetition and emotion will one day become reality.”

Earl Nightingale (1921–1989) American motivational speaker

Reality

“When you're attracted to someone, it just means that your subconscious is attracted to their subconscious, subconsciously. So what we think of as fate is just two neuroses knowing that they are a perfect match.
- Sleepless in Seattle”

Nora Ephron (1941–2012) Film director, author screenwriter

Fate, Thinking, Perfection

“You have deep-seated survival anxieties. And you don't like bigots, bullies, snobs or hypocrites. Subconsciously there are many people you hate."

"Consciously, sir, consciously," Yossarian corrected in an effort to help. "I hate them consciously.”

Joseph Heller book Catch-22

Source: Catch-22

Hate, People, Effort, Help

“Sometimes I talk to myself fluently in languages I'm unfamiliar with… just to screw with my subconscious.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

When the Leaves Blow Away (2006), I Still Have a Pony (2007)

“I do a first draft as passionately and as quickly as I can. I believe a story is valid only when it's immediate and passionate, when it dances out of your subconscious. If you interfere in any way, you destroy it.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Way, Passion, Dance

“A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.”

P.G. Wodehouse book The Adventures of Sally

Source: The Adventures of Sally (1922)

Life, Parting

“Being here? With you? I've met my subconscious, and he's not that sick.”

Jim Butcher book Ghost Story

Source: Ghost Story

“My subconscious speaks in a foreign language.”

Deb Caletti (1963) American writer

Source: The Six Rules of Maybe

“It was his subconscious which told him this — that infuriating part of a person's brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing.”

Douglas Adams The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 17

Parting, Personality

“Weren't we all crazy in our sleep? What was sleep, after all, but the process by which we dumped our insanity into a dark subconscious pit and came out on the other side ready to eat cereal instead of our neighbor's children?”

Jeff Lindsay book Darkly Dreaming Dexter

Source: Darkly Dreaming Dexter

Children, Sleep

“It has been proven psychologically that human beings can only appreciate or apprise, i. e. comprehend and understand, something new, if they can succeed in raising up the subconscious immured in their brain cells into their higher consciousness. If this cannot be achieved, then all preaching is useless. And even the eye has first to learn how to see everything new; it too must therefore be awoken from its latency before it can grasp the seen. Above all, there must be readiness to consider even supposed wonders as the forerunners of forthcoming realities, for only thus can the foundations be laid upon which rational mind can calculate and analyse.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Viktor Schauberger in a letter to Hermann Jaeger, 31st October 1957, Implosion Magazine, No. 103, p. 20 (Callum Coats: Energy Evolution (2000))
Implosion Magazine

Understanding, Reality, Learning

“Have you ever wondered what your subconscious mind looks like? Well today, I can show you.”

David Icke (1952) English writer and public speaker

Source: You want to change your life? Then change the way you think! in Bridge of love magazine

“War is a mass phenomenon. To penetrate the basic causes of war, we must discern the factors which have made millions of people abandon their habitual modes of life, their occupations, and their moral concepts to participate in murder and destruction. We should therefore put greater stress upon the simple conscious and. subconscious impulses which rule the behavior of the masses.”

Eugene M. Kulischer (1881–1956) American sociologist

Source: Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917-1947, 1948, p. 3

Life, War, People, Behavior

“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 book Love and Will

Source: Love and Will (1969), Ch. 1 : Introduction : Our Schizoid World, p. 21

Men, Communication

“When a man is ill it is not necessarily because he wants to be ill subconsciously. It is not necessarily because he is receiving some hidden psychological benefit, or because the illness fulfills some need. He is ill often - always in fact - because of a distortion that is occurring within the self, and materialized in physical form.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 297, Page 136
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 7

“Thus when Plotinus speaks of "the flight of the alone to the Alone," and the positivist or the empiricist asserts that these words are meaningless, he is right. Yet this does not import that the words are nonsense locutions, mere senseless noises which a man makes like a cough or a sneeze though it is possible that this is what the positivist intends. If this were so, it would be impossible to explain why generations of men have quoted those famous words. The explanation is that the words evoke in us a measure of the same experience which the author of them had. Our experience may be but a dim reflection of what was in him bright and clear. Our spirits vibrate faintly in unison with the soul of the great mystic, as a tuning fork vibrates faintly in response to the sound of the clear bell. But it is our own spontaneous experience which is evoked; it is not his experience which is communicated to us. His words are as grappling irons let down into the depths of our subconsciousness, which draw our own inner experiences nearer to the conscious threshold. But they are not, for most of us, drawn above the threshold. They remain below the surface faintly visible. Therefore they appear at the upper levels of our consciousness as faint hints, glimpses, and sometimes as mere vague feelings.”

Walter Terence Stace (1886–1967) British civil servant, educator and philosopher.

p. 91-92.

Men, Feeling, Quotes, Soul

“Dreams can be classified in many different ways. We will examine four types. The first concerns dreams that occur as a result of physiological stimulation. […] The second category involves thoughts that are dormant in the subconscious. Whatever you think about often becomes impressed in your subconscious mind. […] The third type of dream concerns the predominating thoughts you have when you are awake. […] The fourth category of dreams involves those that help to work out karma, that is, lessons that are to be experienced in this lifetime. Sometimes, dreams can be used as a medium to play out the karma that one has accumulated. […] This serves two functions: one, it saves time because the dynamics do not have to be played out in the physical realm and two, the lessons learned through the subtle body penetrate the soul more thoroughly, leaving lasting impressions.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume I: Uncovering Spiritual Truths in Psychic Phenomena (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 1: Dreams: A State of Reality, p. 19-20

Dreams, Way, Soul, Thinking

“I can't help believing that these things that come from the subconscious mind have a sort of truth to them. It may not be a scientific truth, but it's psychological truth.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

Locus interview (2000)

Truth, Help

“I have been outflanked by the culture. I am now seen as a drawling Oxonian, and a genetic elitist, who took over the family firm. People subconsciously think that I was born in 1922, wrote Lucky Jim when I was 7, and will live for at least a century. This feels odd to me, because my father was a "angry young man" and helped democratize the British novel. I'm not a toff. I'm a yob.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

"Off the Page: Martin Amis" (2003)

People, Family, Feeling, Thinking

“Well, moving swiftly sideways into cognitive neuroscience…In the past twenty years we’ve made huge strides, using imaging tools, direct brain interfaces, and software simulations. We’ve pretty much disproved the existence of free will, at least as philosophers thought they understood it. A lot of our decision-making mechanics are subconscious; we only become aware of our choices once we’ve begun to act on them. And a whole lot of other things that were once thought to correlate with free will turn out also to be mechanical. If we use transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt the right temporoparietal junction, we can suppress subjects’ ability to make moral judgements; we can induce mystical religious experiences: We can suppress voluntary movements, and the patients will report that they didn’t move because they didn’t want to move. The TMPJ finding is deeply significant in the philosophy of law, by the way: It strongly supports the theory that we are not actually free moral agents who make decisions—such as whether or not to break the law—of our own free will.
“In a nutshell, then, what I’m getting at is that the project of law, ever since the Code of Hammurabi—the entire idea that we can maintain social order by obtaining voluntary adherence to a code of permissible behaviour, under threat of retribution—is fundamentally misguided.” His eyes are alight; you can see him in the Cartesian lecture-theatre of your mind, pacing door-to-door as he addresses his audience. “If people don’t have free will or criminal intent in any meaningful sense, then how can they be held responsible for their actions? And if the requirements of managing a complex society mean the number of laws have exploded until nobody can keep track of them without an expert system, how can people be expected to comply with them?”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 26, “Liz: It’s Complicated” (pp. 286-287)

People, Law, Way, Idea

“I think your subconscious knows far more than your conscious, so I trust it. I just make it first and then it becomes much clearer to me why.”

Cornelia Parker (1956) English artist

Source: Simon Hattenstone. "Cornelia Parker: a History of Violence." in: The Guardian. May 25, 2010.

Thinking

“If society is to progress on a truly humanistic basis, without being subject to mental epidemics and virulent social diseases to which the subconscious falls an easy victim, the personal consciousness of every individual should be cultivated to the highest degree possible.”

Boris Sidis The Source and Aim of Human Progress

The Source and Aim of Human Progress (1919)

Disease, Personality

“Why is it, one is apt to ask on an occasion like this, that people come forward to make these gifts, and why should it be necessary to preserve spots like this? I think it answers to a very deep and profound instinct of the English people. We have become largely an urban folk, but there lies, deep down in the hearts of even of those who have toiled in our cities for two or three generations, an ineradicable love of country things and country beauty, as it may exist in them traditionally and subconsciously; and to them, as much as and even more than to ourselves, the country represents the eternal values and the eternal traditions from which we must never allow ourselves to be separated.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech at the handing over ceremony of Haresfield Beacon to the National Trust (10 January 1931), published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 120.
1931

Love, People, Beauty, Thinking

“As I looked more carefully at the listening matrix I saw that during the past twenty years we had taken a magnifying glass to the first of these four quadrants, the female experience of powerlessness. I saw I was subconsciously making a false assumption: The more deeply I understood women's experience of powerlessness, the more I assumed men had the power women did not have. In fact, what I was understanding was the female experience of male power.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Are the Way They Are (1988), p. xx-xxi.

Women, Men, Understanding, Past

“The foundations of the universal value of art are given to us now by psychology. This is the common base that enables us to sink its roots to the origins before man and to discover the primary myths of humanity. The artist must confront these myths and reduce them, by means of amorphous and confused materials, to clear images. Since these are atavistic forces that have their origins in the subconscious, the work of art takes on a magical significance.”

Piero Manzoni (1933–1963) Italian artist

Source: For the Discovery of a Zone of Images', Piero Manzoni, 1957, pp. 16-17

Art, Universe

“In the subconscious fantasies that make conception look so alluring, it is often ourselves that we would like to see live forever, not someone with a personality of his own.”

Andrew Solomon (1963) American journalist

Far from the Tree

Personality

“It may be true that only those minds which are habituated to think logically can safely trust their intuitive conclusions, on the theory that the subconscious level will do its kind of work as faithfully as the conscious does its kind.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“Life without prejudice,” p. 9.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

Thinking

“No one in art has yet penetrated as far [as Dostoyevsky into the mystical realms of the soul, towards the metaphysical, the subconsciousness, viewing the external reality of the world as merely a sign, a symbol of the spiritual and metaphysical.”

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Norwegian painter and printmaker

Quote in Edvard Munch, Hans Dedekam, Kristiana 1909, p. 4
1896 - 1930

World, Art, Soul, Reality

“Traditions are the guideposts driven deep in our subconscious minds. The most powerful ones are those we can't even describe and aren't even aware of.”

Ellen Goodman (1941) American journalist and writer

Attributed

“Human artifacts are not stains imposed on nature. Such a view drives a wedge between humanity and the rest of the community of life. A golf ball is the manifestation of the mind of a clever, playful African primate. This primate loves to invent games to test its physical and mental skill. Generally, these games are played on carefully reconstructed replicas of the savanna from which the ape came and for which its subconscious still hankers. The clever primate belongs in this world. … To love nature and to hate humanity is illogical.”

David G. Haskell (1950) writer, Biologist

"August 8th — Earthstar," pages 157-158 The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature http://theforestunseen.com/ (2012)

Love, Life, Hate, World

“I have mentioned that any action has an electromagnetic reality. In telepathic and clairvoyant experiences, the electromagnetic pattern is transmitted. It must then be transformed into a pattern that can be distinguished by the ego, if the individual is to be consciously aware of the data. Often the information that is picked up translated by the subconscious and acted upon without conscious approval or recognition. In almost all cases, however, there must be an emotional attraction, for this is what allows for the initial transmission, and makes it possible.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness, (1986), p. 272, quoting from Session 197

Reality

“Andrej’s mind, like any sane human’s … was a constantly convulsing dialectical unity of consciousness and subconsciousness, the battening down and channelling of dreams and desires, the recurring re-creation of the subliminal by the contradictory, the rational-capricious ego. And vice versa. The interaction of levels of consciousness into an unstable and permanently self-renewing whole.”

China Miéville book Perdido Street Station

Source: Perdido Street Station (2000), p. 553

Dreams

“Subconsciously he knew too, that the oriental woman is not a sensualist in the European sense; there is nothing mawkish in her constitution. Her true obsessions are power, politics and possessions - however much she might deny it. The sex ticks on in the mind, but its motions are warmed by the kinetic brutalities of money.”

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

Source: The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Mountolive (1958), X

Money, Sex, Sense

“Men, be vigilant!
Those are killers.
They don't care about introspection, still-lifes, structuralism, colours and sounds:
They kill.
They don't care about Chuang-tzu, Kafka, the unconscious and the subconscious, Breton and surrealism, Hamlet and "to be or not to be," they just don't care;
They kill.
They sweep on us as the twitter of birds greets the coming of dawn
Or during starlit and love-laden nights
Or when the sky is at its bluest
When gardens are fragrant with the scent of flowers
And the fruit sweet like human lips.”

Chế Lan Viên (1920–1989) Vietnamese writer

"The Enemy and Us", in Vietnam Courier (December 1972), quoted in Traveling to Vietnam: American Peace Activists and the War by Mary Hershberger (Syracuse University Press, 1998), ISBN 978-0815605171, p. 180

Love, Life, Men, Flowers

“The appearance in the mind of undesirable and ignoble thoughts, even if they are very fleeting and only half-articulate, has an unpleasant effect upon one’s self-esteem. Therefore such thoughts are often shoved aside, unattended to and unopposed. Often they are also camouflaged by more pleasing and respectable labels which hide their true nature. Thoughts disposed of in either of these two ways will strengthen the accumulated power of ignoble tendencies in the subconscious.”

Nyanaponika Thera (1901–1994) German Buddhist monk

Source: The Vision of Dhamma (1994), p. 79

Way, Nature, Appearance

“In discussing his work [the art of Marcel Duchamp, ] it is necessary to avoid overrating his silence. I hold him in a very high esteem, but I have to reject his silence. Duchamp was simply finished. He had run out of ideas; he was unable to come up with anything important… I would say that even the bourgeois tendencies in Duchamp's work – i. e., a form of provocative, bohemian behavior intended to 'épater le bourgeois'- follow the same path. Duchamp started out from here and wanted to shock the bourgeoisie, and because of that he destroyed his creative powers… The content of Duchamp's silence refers to the aim of leaving the subconscious passive, of developing it. This is the aspect of Duchamp, which is related to Surrealism. The surrealists asserted that they could live with their subconscious; they thought they were above reality, but instead they were beneath it. They thought they could fish in muddy waters…. but to my mind, the images which emerged have a repressive effect.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Quote in an interview with , 1986; republished in: Joseph Beuys, Carin Kuoni. Joseph Beuys in America: Energy Plan for the Western Man. New York, 1993.pp. 169-170
Beuys refers in his quote to the so-called 'Silence of Marcel Duchamp', the period that Duchamp stopped creating art
1980's

Art, Behavior, Idea, Reality

“It was a couple of days before Kate Schechter became aware of any of these things, or indeed of anything at all in the outside world.
She passed the time quietly in a world of her own in which she was surrounded as far as the eye could see with old cabin trunks full of past memories in which she rummaged with great curiosity, and sometimes bewilderment. Or, at least, about a tenth of the cabin trunks were full of vivid, and often painful or uncomfortable memories of her past life; the other nine-tenths were full of penguins, which surprised her. Insofar as she recognised at all that she was dreaming, she realised that she must be exploring her own subconscious mind. She had heard it said that humans are supposed only to use about a tenth of their brains, and that no one was very clear what the other nine-tenths were for, but she had certainly never heard it suggested that they were used for storing penguins.”

Douglas Adams The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 2

Life, Pain, World, Dreams

“My secret desire is for the whole world to eventually play games and for games to have the kind of influence that books and movies do. Games are a great place for the planet's collective subconscious to grow as we further our understanding of each other.”

Jeremy Soule (1975) American composer

Jeremy Soule Interview https://web.archive.org/web/20021026151734/http://www.stratosgroup.com/features/interviews.php?selected=200206jsbh (June 04, 2002). Attributed

Secret, Books, World, Game

“Instead, it had slipped into her subconscious, and worked its way beneath her skin.”

Christopher Golden (1967) American writer

Page 280 Last Breath
Body of Evidence

Way

“The loathing of mankind is a force that surprises and overwhelms one, fed by hundreds of springs concealed his subconsciousness. One only detects its presence after having long entertained it unawares.”

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), pp. 113

Spring

“There is a certain indolence in us, a wish not to be disturbed, which tempts us to think that when things are quiet, all is well. Subconsciously, we tend to give the preference to 'social peace,' though it be only apparent, because our lives and possessions seem then secure. Actually, human beings acquiesce too easily in evil conditions; they rebel far too little and too seldom. There is nothing noble about acquiescence in a cramped life or mere submission to superior force.”

A. J. Muste (1885–1967) Christian pacifist and civil rights activist

"Pacifism and Class War" in The Essays of A. J. Muste (1967) edited by p. 179-85; also quoted in American Power and the New Mandarins (2002) by Noam Chomsky, p. 160.

Life, Peace, Thinking, Evil

“All women are aware of that moment when suddenly the boys don’t look at you. It’s a fairly common thing, when suddenly you no longer attract that instant male attention because of the way you look. I never really knew how to enjoy beauty, but it took the form of a subconscious arrogance, expecting things, all muddled up with celebrity.”

Julie Christie (1940) British actress and activist

As quoted in "A Role About Winter for Julie Christie, a Star in Eternal Spring http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/movies/18chri.html?_r=0" by Alan Riding in The New York Times (18 April 2007)]

Women, Beauty, Way, Boy

“The Dada movement was an anti-movement which corresponded to a need born of the first World War. Although neither literary nor pictorial in essence, Dada found its exponents in painters and writers scattered all over the world. Max Ernst's activities in Cologne in 1917 made him the foremost representative of the Dada painters. Between 1919 and 1921 his paintings, drawings and collages depicting the world of the subconscious were already a foretaste of Surrealism... In fact his previous achievements had certainly influenced, to a great extent, the literary Surrealist exploration of the subconscious.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

Quote in 'Appreciations of other artists': Max Ernst (painter, sculptor author) 1945, by Marcel Duchamp; as cited in Catalog, Collection of the Societé Anonyme, eds. Michel Sanouillet / Elmer Peterson, London 1975, pp. 143- 159
1921 - 1950

War, World, Drawing, Painting

“I can see only one ultimate way out of the morass in which we are engulfed. The present commercial system will have to go, and there will have to be a return to the much simpler systems of co-operation be-longing to a bygone age … To that condition, or something very like it, I am convinced we shall have to return if society is to survive. I say this after a long and close observation of life in many phases. … This is what the miners, I think, in a dim, subconscious way, have already perceived, for they retain in their minds much of the primitive mentality of pre-civilization days.”

Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) British poet and academic

The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife (1919)

Life, Age, Way, Thinking

“If Seth had read Mark's mind, this was an excellent progression. If not, then Mark had deceived himself, and Seth had gone along and taken advantage of the deception. And if Seth was a personification of my subconscious, then this would be an excellent example of subconscious fraud.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness, (1986), p. 164

Fraud, Reading

“When people are afraid of the truth they've got nowhere to turn. All they have at their disposal is censorship and denial. And Swedish politicians are so deep in denial you can only feel pity for them, because you know that in some dark chamber of their subconscious these wretched people know what a terrible thing they're doing, and they know that history is going to revile them and their entire generation for it. But they just can't face up to it. Psychologically, they are simply not big enough as people to acknowledge, let alone confront, the enormity of their mistake. They've backed themselves into an ideological corner where their only option now is to double down on the insanity and brazen it out until the bitter end, while criminalising anyone who draws attention to it. Whatever social upheaval it may cause, and whatever the cost to Sweden's women, mass Islamic immigration must continue. Any restriction would be an admission that there's a problem, and that would fatally undermine everything they're so desperately pretending to believe in… If you say there's a problem, you'll be treated as a criminal – which means that there are now two problems. One: the Swedish people have an aggressive social cancer growing in their midst; and two: they're not allowed to talk about it.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"Sweden Goes Insane" (19 May 2014) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_znVnOizU8 2014

Women, People, Truth, Feeling

“Male Message 1 is subconsciously experienced by the boy like this: ‘Some girls in my class already look like movie stars. If they wanted me as much as I want them, then I’d know I was okay. They are genetic celebrities. I am a genetic groupie.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Are the Way They Are (1988), p. 111.

Girl, Star, Boy

“I do like movies that take a toll on the audience. I want to work the subconscious. I want to involve you in ways in which you might not necessarily want to get involved. I want to play off those things that you're expecting to get when the lights go down and the 20th Century Fox logo comes up. There's an audience expectation and I'm interested in how movies play with--and off--that expectation. That's what I'm interested in.”

David Fincher (1962) American film director

Fightin Words (1999)

Way, Light

“I think that everybody has a backhoe in his or her head, and at moments of stress or trouble you can fire it up and simply push everything into a great big slit-trench in the floor of your conscious mind. Get rid of it. Bury it. Except that that slit-trench goes down into the subconscious, and sometimes, in dreams, the bodies stir and walk.”

Stephen King book Christine

Pt. 1, Ch. 18
Christine (1983)

Dreams, Thinking

“I wouldn't have said off-hand that I had a subconscious mind, but I suppose I must without knowing it, and no doubt it was there, sweating away diligently at the old stand, all the while the corporeal Wooster was getting his eight hours.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Right Ho, Jeeves

Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)

“The Psychology of Delay. Some of the causes of delay in coming to economic decisions in our country seem to lie in the psychological realm. There is such a thing as the psychology of power which motivates people: power of control and patronage, power to delay an application, power to hold up a file, power to keep people waiting in an ante-room, all of which are consciously or subconsciously treated as symbols of prestige and hallmarks of importance.”

J. R. D. Tata (1904–1993) Indian businessman

To The Central Advisory Council of Industries, New Delhi, January 3, 1969.
Keynote: Excerpts from his speeches and chairman's statements to shareholders

People, Lie, Motivation, Decision

“It would be lovely to think I had become a genius," he smiles, "but the fact is that I've forgotten most of it. Occasionally I can be watching University Challenge and a stray fact emerges from the recesses of my subconscious that I didn't know I knew, but for the most part I'm as vague on the details as I ever was.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

Bill Bryson: The accidental chancellor (November 15, 2005)

Love, Smile, Thinking, Universe

“Would you be impressed if I said that the dead would help us counting

Every single moment that we waste our time?

All the time we're spending vaccinating this disease

I just get dizzy when I think of all the ways we try to hide our maladies

We wine (We wine!), we dine (We dine!), and everything is fine

Because it's not my fault

Now you're upset because you finally got the notion

That everything you had is spinning down the drain

Oh! Do you mean it when you beg and pray and plead?

Your "Giveittomegiveittomegiveittomegiveittome all those things we need"

And what, pray tell, will you whimper when your number will be called

You'll say "It's not my fault"

I had a dream last night where everyone was trying

Subconsciously I knew it was a lie

And when I woke I knew that it was time to pray

To make amends before the end, before my judgement day

I looked around, I stood alone, I knew what I had to say

I said "It's all my fault"”

Tomas Kalnoky (1980) American musician

"Would You Be Impressed?" from "Somewhere in the Between" (2007) http://risc.perix.co.uk/lyrics/sm/sitb/03/

Lie, Disease, Dreams, Way

“A social aggregate which has chosen the fatal path of organic evolution must succumb to the same law of organic development to which all organisms are subject, namely greater and greater organization, increase of structure, greater differentiation, decrease of critical, personal, consciousness, loss of individual liberty, increased activity of the subconscious forces, falling into a state of somnambulism which can only be redeemed by revolution or by death.”

Boris Sidis The Source and Aim of Human Progress

The Source and Aim of Human Progress (1919)

Death, Law, Loss, Personality

“I have told you that upon physical death the ego becomes the subconscious in the next existence, and that its conscious knowing is retained electromagnetically.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 218, Page 142
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 5

Death

“The idea of feminine authority is so deeply embedded in the human subconscious that even after all these centuries of father-right the young child instinctively regards the mother as the supreme authority. He looks upon the father as equal with himself, equally subject to the woman's rule. Children have to be taught to love, honor, and respect the father, a task usually assumed by the mother.”

Elizabeth Gould Davis book The First Sex

The First Sex, ch. 7 - Mother-Right (1971).

Love, Children, Idea

“I’d like to think I have somehow connected or tapped to our collective subconscious, but in a sense I am just pulling ideas off the morning news. The real challenge is to make art out of these bits and pieces of our reality. I am a third-generation artist raised in the ghetto who was classically educated. This had its assets and liabilities.”

Joe Lewis (artist) (1953) American photographer

Walter Robinson. " Joe Lewis: Clairvoynace http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/robinson/robinson8-16-07.asp" at artnet.com, 2015.

Education, Art, Idea, Thinking

“As absurd as it might sound, there's a strange synergy between very bad movies and very good ones. That's because films on either extreme of the quality scale have the ability to burrow deep into the subconscious, with unpredictable and occasionally remarkable results. Great works of art can cause euphoria, touch a deep emotional chord, or, in rare cases, affect fundamental changes in a person's outlook on life. Conversely, viewing unwatchable tripe can be damaging, possibly resulting in psychotic episodes, an appreciation of '70s fashion, or leaping to the defense of Pauly Shore. There's something almost profound about enduring a horrifically inept piece of cinema, and Coyote Ugly, living up to every letter in its name, offers the opportunity for such an experience.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=1611 of Coyote Ugly (2000). One-star reviews

Life, Art, Fashion, Change

“The expression of joy also makes the ego more resilient, less fearful, less resentful of diverse conditions when they occur. The emotion itself is an automatic signal that unites the conscious and subconscious is shared experience.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 152, Page 21
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 4

Fear, Joy

“I refuse to play the wink-wink-nudge-nudge game with readers. I don’t like whimsy because it doesn’t treat the fantastic seriously, and treating the fantastic seriously is one of the best ways of celebrating dialectical human consciousness there is. The one-sided celebration of the ego-driven contextually constrained instrumentally rational (as opposed to rational in a broader sense) is bureaucratic: the one-sided celebration of the subconscious, desire/fantasy driven is at best utopian, at worst sociopathic. The best fantasies—which include sf and horror—are constructed with a careful dialectic between conscious and subconscious.”

China Miéville (1972) English writer

interview with Joan Gordon

Way, Game, Sense

“That uncountable myths and legends and ecclesiastical operas and dirges have at their core, if not in their trappings, near identical mechanisms, performances, and outcomes is proof most solid of the centrality of the panhuman subconscious—or superconscious—experience of the myriad and manifold wonders and terrors of the cosmos.”

Malcolm Azania book The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad

Appendix (p. 525)
The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad (2004)

“For the neurotic, the merging of the subconscious and the conscious may be risky, just as it is for the users of drugs. But for the writer who is aware of the way in which this connection exists in reality and nourishes creativity, the sooner he can achieve a synthesis among intellect, emotion, and instinct, the sooner his work will be integrated.”

Anaïs Nin book The Novel of the Future

The Novel of the Future (1969)

Way, Reality

“If until now colour and form were used as inner agents, it was mainly done subconsciously. The subordination of composition to geometrical form is no new idea (cf. the art of the Persians). Construction on a purely spiritual basis is a slow business, and at first seemingly blind and unmethodical. The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul, so that it can weigh colours in its own scale and thus become a determinant in artistic creation. If we begin at once to break the bonds that bind us to nature and to devote ourselves purely to combination of pure colour and independent form, we shall produce works that are mere geometric decoration, resembling something like a necktie or a carpet. Beauty of form and colour is no sufficient aim by itself, despite the assertions of pure aesthetes or even of naturalists obsessed with the idea of "beauty". It is because our painting is still at an elementary stage that we are so little able to be moved by wholly autonomous colour and form composition. The nerve vibrations are there (as we feel when confronted by applied art), but they get no farther than the nerves because the corresponding vibrations of the spirit which they call forth are weak. When we remember however, that spiritual experience is quickening, that positive science, the firmest basis of human thought is tottering, that dissolution of matter is imminent, we have reason to hope that the hour of pure composition is not far away. The first stage has arrived.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Quote from Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Wassily Kandinsky, Munich, 1912; as cited in Kandinsky, Frank Whitford, Paul Hamlyn Ltd, London 1967, p. 15
1910 - 1915

Beauty, Hope, Art, Feeling

“I guess I can't, or my subconscious can't, even imagine a warless world. The best it can do is substitute one kind of war for another. You said, no killing of humans by other humans. So I dreamed up the Aliens. Your own ideas are sane and rational, but this is my unconscious you're trying to use, not my rational mind. Maybe rationally I could conceive of the human species not trying to kill each other off by nations, in fact rationally it's easier to conceive of than the motives of war. But you're handling something outside reason. You're trying to reach progressive, humanitarian goals with a tool that isn't suited to the job. Who has humanitarian dreams?”

Ursula K. Le Guin book The Lathe of Heaven

Source: The Lathe of Heaven (1971), Chapter 6 (Orr)

War, World, Dreams, Imagination

“I've always subconsciously looked out for the total Christian and when I found him he turned out to be a non-practicing Jew.”

William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008) American conservative author and commentator

Let Us Talk of Many Things : The Collected Speeches (2000) ISBN-13: 978-0761525516 Referring to Richard M. Clurman (1924 - 1996), a journalist, editor and administrator best known for his long association with Time magazine. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1996/06/03/1996_06_03_056_TNY_CARDS_000376587

“The schools, having found the object of their long, blind searching, shall teach directness, simplicity, naturalness: they shall protect the young against palpable illusion. They shall teach that, while man once invented a process called composition, Nature has forever brought forth organisms. They shall encourage the love of Nature that wells up in every childish heart, and shall not suppress, shall not stifle, the teeming imagination of the young.
They shall teach, as the result of their own bitter experience, that conscious mental effort, that conscious emotionality, are poor mates to breed from, and that true parturition comes of a deep, instinctive, subconscious desire. That true art, springing fresh from Nature, must have in it, to live, much of the glance of an eye, much of the sound of a voice, much of the life of a life.
That Nature is strong, generous, comprehensive, fecund, subtile: that in growth and decadence she continually sets forth the drama of man's life.
That, thro' the rotating seasons, thro' the procession of the years, thro' the march of the centuries, permeating all, sustaining all, there murmurs the still, small voice of a power that holds us in the hollow of its hand.”

Louis Sullivan (1856–1924) American architect

Emotional Architecture as Compared to Intellectual (1894)

Love, Life, School, Art

“The subconscious plays a great part in art, that is to say that in conceiving & realizing a work a great deal happens which cannot be logically explained – the mind jumps from one stage to another much further on without there being traceable steps shown between – sudden solutions which cannot be followed step by step – in a word – inspiration.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Source: 1925 - 1940, Unpublished notes' for 'The Sculptor Speaks' (1937), p. 113

Art, Parting

“Charlie really has this, like, obsessive death wish! Yes! he, he wants to be caught, processed, put in a can, not just any can, you dig, it has to be StarKist! suicidal brand loyalty, man, deep parable of consumer capitalism, they won't be happy with anything less than drift-netting us all, chopping us up and stacking us on the shelves of Supermarket Amerika, and subconsciously the horrible thing is, is we want them to do it…”

Thomas Pynchon book Inherent Vice

Source: Inherent Vice (2009), p. 119

Death, Suicide, Loyalty, Happiness

“So much of every art is an expression of the subconscious that it seems to me most of all the important qualities are put there unconsciously, and little of importance by the conscious intellect. But these are things for the psychologist to untangle.”

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) prominent American realist painter and printmaker

Quote in Hopper's letter to Charles H. Sawyer, October 29, 1939; as cited in Edward Hopper, Lloyd Goodrich; New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1971, p. 164
1911 - 1940

Art

“A dream is by definition a series of sensations that occur in the brain when both our senses of perception and our powers of will and reason are in abeyance, so that we have no control over that flux of sensations. But it is, of course, a well-known phenomenon that when we dream that we are dreaming, the dream ends and we awaken. Then the conscious mind takes over and we are again responsible for our thoughts, and must face a day in which we must be responsible for our actions, which, by their wisdom or folly, may determine the rest of our lives. Our dreams may give expression, pleasant or painful, to our subconscious desires or fears. But in our waking hours we must, if we are rational, make our decisions on the basis of the most objective and cold-blooded estimates that we can make: estimates of the forces and tendencies in the world about us; estimates of the realities with which we must deal; remembering always that nothing is likely to happen just because we think it's good, or unlikely to happen just because we think it's evil.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"What We Owe Our Parasites", speech (June 1968); Free Speech magazine (October and November 1995)
1960s

Wisdom, Pain, World, Fear

“Every novelist write what he or she needs to write, a subconscious compulsion to express and explain his unique view of reality.”

P. D. James (1920–2014) English crime writer

Time to be Earnest - a Fragment of Biography Faber & Faber, London 1999.
Time to be Earnest - a Fragment of Biography

Reality

“Any such material, received through the board, through automatic writing, or voice communication, should be carefully studied. Generally speaking, if your messages claim to originate from famous dead personalities, you can discount them as valid information. In all probability, they are creative fabrications of your own personal subconscious.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: How To Develop Your ESP Power (1966), p. 31

Communication, Study, Personality, Dead

“What makes the Nightmares on Elm Street universal and forever in their attraction, I think, is simply the dream. The landscape of the mind, the subconscious, the nightmare. Everybody has a nightmare, and everybody apparently has falling dreams, and everybody has the drowning dream, and everybody has certain kinds of sexual manifestation dreams, as well as our stress dreams; I didn’t study for the algebra test, I didn’t study for my driving test, you know, all those dreams. I still have those dreams, and it’s just such an interesting thing that our mind can turn against us, our own mind, you know we all have.”

Robert Englund (1947) American actor, voice-actor, singer, and director

Robert Englund On El Rey’s 45 Hour ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ Marathon, the Passing of Wes Craven, and the Current State of the Slasher Genre http://bloody-disgusting.com/interviews/3379567/3379567/ (February 12, 2016)

Dreams, Thinking, Study, Universe

“Surely one of the reasons for our continued failures throughout these areas [Asia and the Middle East] has been our inability to understand how profound, how irrational, and how erratic has been the reaction generally of the respective peoples to the ideas and impulses that have come to them from the West in recent decades. This applies particularly to the intellectuals who play so prominent a part in political leadership and in the molding of public opinion. To ascertain the reasons for the intensely anti-American attitudes manifested by these people would be to delve deeply into psychological reactions and the origins of various forms of neuroses. I have thoughts about these matters, but will not take up your time with them here.
Only one thing I would emphasize. The respective reactions are obviously emotional and subconscious, and not likely to be altered by any attempts on our part to meet them by any verbal appeal to rational processes.”

George F. Kennan (1904–2005) American advisor, diplomat, political scientist and historian

January 23, 1952
The Kennan Diaries

People, Idea, Failure, Understanding

“The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.”

Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) French writer and philosopher

Source: La poétique de la rêverie (The Poetics of Reverie) (1960), Ch. 2, sect. 2

Truth

“In 1936 the notion of a computable function was clarified by Turing, and he showed the existence of universal computers that, with an appropriate program, could compute anything computed by any other computer. […] In some subconscious sense even the sales departments of computer manufacturers are aware of this, and they do not advertise magic instructions that cannot be simulated on competitors machines, but only that their machines are faster, cheaper, have more memory, or are easier to program.”

John McCarthy (1927–2011) American computer scientist and cognitive scientist

" Towards a Mathematical Science of Computation http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/towards.html", Information Processing 1962: Proceedings of IFIP Congress 62, ed. Cicely M. Popplewell (Amsterdam, 1963), pp. 21–28 1960s

Sense, Universe, Memory

““When you talk about being an ‘anticipator,’ of having a pretty good idea of when something’s going to happen—or how, or who will be there—isn’t that a kind of divination?”
“No. I think it’s more a kind of subconscious knack for dealing with statistics, against a fairly well-known field of actions.””

Roger Zelazny book A Night in the Lonesome October

October 23 (p. 173)
A Night in the Lonesome October (1993)

Idea, Thinking