Dual Consciousness Quotes

When I'm acting, I'm two beings. There's the one monitoring the distance between myself and the camera, making sure I hit my marks, and there is the one driven by this inner fire, this delicious fear.

These are planes of consciousness, and I think human beings exist on two planes of consciousness, the soul and the ego.

When one is working out a problem ... life becomes duality. One's ego transacts the ordinary routine of things, as if the mind had an upper and lower story and the regular performance of the day's duties moved and motivated on the upper floor, while down below the all-absorbing problem toils silently, forcefully, toward its solution.

I think art, at its best, happens on a conscious and a subconscious level.

Even in rapture, part of the mind watches.

Western man is schizophrenic.

I mean, if you've ever spoken to someone with two heads, you know they know something you don't.

When I work with a character like Valjean on stage, I get totally absorbed in that man. I become that man. But there's always, outside of that, the third eye, which watches what you're doing. And you can say to yourself, 'I'm crying well' or 'I'm being angry well.' But there's always that element there, and it never stops.

I believe we are all dual beings. Some cultures actually believe we have two souls.

I always wanted to have sort of an alter ego.

I've always been interested in the intersection between our rational and our unconscious lives.

There is a way of ordering our mental life on more than one level at once. On one level we can be thinking, discussing, seeing, calculating, meeting all the demands of external affairs, but deep within, behind the scenes at a profounder level we may also be in prayer and adoration, song and worship and a gentle receptiveness to divine breathings.

I think I was always bound to become two selves, if I wasn't already.

Watching myself. Watching the people around me. There was some part of me that was there as a kid and growing up and living my life, but there was also some part of me that was watching it all happen from the nosebleeds.

There's a softer and harder person in everyone, depending on the time.

Even though I went to Exeter and Yale, and I enjoyed all the trappings of those places, I think at the same time - and maybe it's because I'm an immigrant kid and not white - there was always this other consciousness; that is, I was conscious of everything that was going on.

It's something I've noticed with my two children - children frequently know and don't know at the same time. They are aware of aspects of the world that are a little bit shadowy, and they choose not to engage with them.

I had two parts of my body: my left side, which was strong and somewhat dumb, and the other side was weak and hard to control but perhaps smarter. It gave me a very strong sense of the duality of the plane that we live in.

There's part of our brain that we shut off when we're in the studio. There's part of our brain that we turn on when we are out doing an interview or promoting something or waking up at six in the morning for hair and makeup.

Each morning, we return from the dream soul trying to adjust to the day world, that moment when the two souls exchange places in the driver’s seat.

I wonder if I don't give too much of myself to writing: I am always half where I am; the other half is feeding the furnace, kick-starting the heat of creativity. I am making love with someone but at the same time I'm noticing how this graceful hand across my belly might just fit in with the memory of lilacs in Albuquerque in 1974.

It is precisely as though I were possessed by some other spirit when I enter on a new task of acting, as though something within me presses a switch and my own consciousness merges into some other, greater, more vital being.