Jonathan Haidt Quotes

The mind has a complex life that can seem quite autonomous - dreams, obsessions, unwilled memory are all instances of this.

Our unconscious is like a vast subterranean factory with intricate machinery that is never idle, where work goes on day and night from the time we are born until the moment of our death.

It's useful to think of the imagination as an aspect of the body because it seems to have processes of its own that are obscure to us.

We are a psychic process which we do not control, or only partly direct. Consequently, we cannot have any final judgment about ourselves or our lives.

Subconscious minds are no less fallible than the objective mind.

At times your unconsciousness is truer than your conscious mind

Psychoanalysts and elephants, they never forget.

Scientific thought and the miraculous unconscious are two waves in the same ocean.

The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.

Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human.

One's mind has a way of making itself up in the background, and it suddenly becomes clear what one means to do.

We all have an edge. We all are floating our psyche on top with a great ocean underneath.

This is another major feature of thought: Thought doesn't know it is doing something and then it struggles against it is doing. It doesn't want to know that it is doing it.

I have always been fascinated by the human mind, conscious and unconscious - that is what writing and reading is about, too. The why of your life and the why of your choices and the what has happened that you know and the what that you don't know is really riveting, and psychoanalysts share my wonder at how it all unfolds.

When I started writing, I was a great rationalist and believed I was absolutely in control. But the older one gets, the more confused, and for an artist I think that is quite a good thing: you allow in more of your instinctual self; your dreams, fantasies and memories. It's richer, in a way.

Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.

My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious.

It wasn't a Freudian slip. I wasn't even aware of it.

The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.

The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.

Sometimes my dreams are so deep that I dream that I'm dreaming.

The story of the subconscious mind can be told in three words: there is none.

Our whole past experience is continually in our consciousness, though most of it sunk to a great depth of dimness. I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way.

Nobody doubts the importance of conscious experience; why then should we doubt the significance of unconscious happenings? They also are part of our life, and sometimes more truly a part of it for weal or woe than any happenings of the day.

I think that in general it is a good plan occasionally to bear in mind the fact that people were in the habit of dreaming before there was such a thing as psychoanalysis.