Hermann Ebbinghaus Quotes

Our minds are mysterious; our conscious brain is like a ship on a sea that is obscure to us.

We all need to look into the dark side of our nature - that's where the energy is, the passion. People are afraid of that because it holds pieces of us we're busy denying.

You don't really see yourself doing things, of course, but you feel.

I feel like I've dreamed half of my life that hasn't happened yet, so a lot of times I'm going along, and I do stuff, and I know that I've done it. I have deja vus more than I have regular experiences. If half of your day is a deja vu, then you start to wonder, 'What is real and what isn't?'

The interesting thing about something in the back of your mind is that it can travel pretty far back in your mind.

How thin and insecure is that little beach of white sand we call consciousness. I've always known that in my writing it is the dark troubled sea of which I know nothing, save its presence, that carried me. I've always felt that creating was a fearless and a timid, a despairing and hopeful, launching out into that unknown.

The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.

Desire suppressed finds its way into other more surreal settings, into dreams.

If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream.

People have motives and thoughts of which they are unaware.

Recollection is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it.

How come I love having an episode of deja vu? It's akin to an out-of-body experience, I would think. It sits with me, happily, begging me to delve into my memory to find its match point.

I don't know if you can articulate an instinct.

I can't remember any dreams in my life. There's so much strange in real life that it often seems like a dream.

For better or for worse, my brother and I both have some Jungian leanings, so we're tempted to think that these bits and bobs of the past are knocking around in everyone's heads somehow to some degree, and they just need to be jiggled into the front of their head in the mind again.

It has been said of dreams that they are a 'controlled psychosis,' or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours.

In sleep, fantasy takes the form of dreams. But in waking life, too, we continue to dream beneath the threshold of consciousness, especially when under the influence of repressed or other unconscious complexes.

The thing with psychoanalysis is I know basically what happened in my childhood. I know where things went wrong and I know what my mother said at one point and what my father said at one point.

In writing one draws in the rest, the forgotten parts.

Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.

But the repressed merges into the id as well, and is merely a part of it. The repressed is only cut off sharply from the ego by the resistances of repression; it can communicate with the ego through the id.

Revery, which is thought in its nebulous state, borders closely upon the land of sleep, by which it is bounded as by a natural frontier.

We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.

The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own

poets are privileged to utter more than they can always quite explain, bringing up from the mind's unplumbed depths tokens of the nature of the world we carry within us.