"Elan vital" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Unconscious (or subconscious), to the vast area of mental activity which exists outside the circle of our awareness. In doing so it has grasped at the very roots of life itself, has groped down to the depths where the "life-force," the elan vital, touches our individual being. What this may entail in the future we can only dimly guess. Just as the discovery of America altered the balance of the Old World, shifting it westward to the shores of the Atlantic, so the discovery and investigation of the Unconscious seems destined to shift ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks
... turned astonished blue eyes towards Mr. Wimbush, then let them fall onto the seething mass of elan vital that ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... much of the "will to live", which was, in his view, as unconscious as it was fundamental, and only secondarily gave rise to the conscious life of sensations and ideas. Bergson's "elan vital" has much the same meaning. In a sense, the will to live is the fountain of all our wishes; in another sense, it is the sum total of them all; and in another sense, it is an abstraction, the concrete facts consisting in the various particular wishes ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth |
