Unconscious Motivations Quotes

Mankind are governed more by their feelings than by reason. Events which excite those feelings will produce wonderful effects.

I think one of the important evolutions is that we no longer feel compulsively the need to argue, or to justify things on a kind of rational level. We are much more willing to admit that certain things are completely instinctive and others are really intellectual.

People have motives and thoughts of which they are unaware.

I wonder if I have woven through dreams the sexual strife. I don't think so. But after all, my business is to weave dreams. I suppose I may be allowed to choose the material.

When there is nothing to desire, there is nothing to dream about either, because dreams are reflections of your desires. Dreams are reflections of your frustrations, dreams are reflections of your repressions, dreams reflect your day-life.

The soul attracts that which it secretly harbors; that which it loves, and also that which it fears. It reaches the height of its cherished aspirations. It falls to the level of its unchastened desires - and circumstances are the means by which the soul receives its own.

Learning that we have a scapegoat is to lose it forever and to expose ourselves to mimetic conflicts with no possible resolution.

Many a one commits a reprehensible action, who is at bottom an honourable man, because man seldom acts upon natural impulse, but from some secret passion of the moment which lies hidden and concealed within the narrowest folds of his heart.

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

The unconscious can become destructive if it is disregarded and thwarted.

The father's greatest folly is that he believes he can be a much more simple person than he is; he is not really able to deal with his own complexity as a human being.

Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.

I think therapy can be very revealing and useful for actors. You start to dig deep and understand certain mechanisms that you hadn't been aware of before and, you know, meanings behind things.

There is probably not one person, however great his virtue, who cannot be led by the complexities of life's circumstances to a familiarity with the vices he condemns the most vehemently--without his completely recognizing this vice which, disguised as certain events, touches him and wounds him: strange words, an inexplicable attitude, on a given night, of the person whom he otherwise has so many reasons to love.

Why do you dream? - because there are so many desires unfulfilled, and to live with unfulfilled desires is painful. In dream you try to fulfill them; in dream you create a false feeling of fulfillment. Hence your dreams show much about you: what your desires are, what you want to become. But if you want to become anything in life, you are asleep.

Kubrick has a divining rod for the concealed, alienating secrets of characters.

Only about one per cent of my paintings show family members. Do they help me deal with problems? It's likely that these problems can only be depicted. But photographs, private ones and others, keep appearing that fascinate me so much that I want to paint them. And sometimes the real meaning these images have for me only becomes apparent later.

A conventional playwright tries to tell you more about the characters than they know about themselves.

These sorts of things can happen, identities can be switched, the emotional implications are something that he has not been trained to feel. His whole life has been about separating himself from these sorts of actions.

I believe everything is autobiographical. If it's not strictly about you, it's your peers, your obsessions, things that make you angry, or things that you've been watching or obsessing about. Preoccupying you for reasons you don't necessarily know, but it's about you. It says a lot about you. It's like when someone tells you their dream and you sit there going, "Do you realize how much you're revealing about yourself right now?" It's kind of embarrassing.

Ideology has very little to do with 'consciousness' - it is profoundly unconscious.

My job gives me the permission to ask really great questions, like, 'Are you sure you're not pissed at him?' or, 'Is the eating really about food, or does it have something to do with your mother?' or, 'How is your sex life? I mean, I know we're here talking about your job, but I can tell this has to do with your sex life.'

I make a film - and once I've made it, everyone comes along and says 'Ah! This is a film that's political, or social', or whatever. But I'm not telling the story that they see. I made a film, told a story, but I wasn't thinking about exactly what it all meant.

A culture in which guilt is automatically assumed to be neurotic and unhealthy has devised a remarkably clever way of protecting its self-interest.

The unconscious is not a demoniacal monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgment go, is completely neutral.It only becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree that we repress it, its danger increases.