Unconscious Experience Quotes

The secret of artistic creation and the effectiveness of art is to be found in a return to the state of 'participation mystique' - to that level of experience at which it is man who lives, and not the individual.

On the rare occasions when our dreams succeed and achieve perfection - most dreams are bungled - the are symbolic chains of scene and images in place of a narrative poetic language; they circumscribe our experiences or expectations or situations with such poetic boldness and decisiveness that in the morning we are always amazed when we remember our dreams.

A fish has no concept of water.

Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.

No writer, I believe, should attempt a novel before he is thirty, and not then unless he has been hopelessly and helplessly involved in life. For the writer who goes out to find material for a novel, as a fishermen goes out to sea to fish, will certainly not write a good novel. Life has to be lived thoughtlessly, unconsciously, at full tilt and for no purpose except its own sake before it becomes, eventually, good material for a novel.

There was a time when I experienced architecture without thinking about it.

Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.

I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.