Quotes About Consciousness

He could see. And he walked along, feeling the joy of a man who sees, a joy that a man tends to forget in sufficient light.

In relation to the natural world, the pleasure of Americans can be destructive in the same way that their work has already proved to be. It is not, certainly, a conscious destructiveness. But in that very unconsciousness it becomes an aspect of one of our worst national failings: our refusal to admit the need to be conscious. Or to put it more meaningfully: our refusal to admit that unconsciousness, in our time, is almost inevitably destructive.

The approach of a man's life out of the past is history, and the approach of time out of the future is mystery. Their meeting is the present, and it is consciousness, the only time life is alive.

His home is the emblem of his status, but it is not the center of his interest or of his consciousness. The history of our time has been to a considerable extent the movement of the center of consciousness away from home.

He has come into a wakefulness as quiet as sleep.

We stood and looked and knowed it was all the time we had and from now on we must remember. We must look now forever.

There is, then, a politics of food that, like any politics, involves our freedom. We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. . . . One reason to eat responsibly is to live free. ("The Pleasures of Eating," 1989)

You'd have to stand twice in the same place to make a shadow.

Whereas the Odyssey represents the maturity of the moral consciousness of a whole people, Huckleberry Finn shows only its beginnings in the mind of a child. And with a self-protective dexterity that would not have surprised Mark Twain in the least, the adult racist mentality of America has dealt with the threat of that beginning by decreeing that Huckleberry Finn is not a book for the chastening of adults, which to a large extent it certainly is, but a book for the entertainment of children.

the intimacy the mind makes with the place it awakens in.

That we live now in an economy that is not sustainable is not the fault only of a few mongers of power and heavy equipment. We all are implicated. We all, in the course of our daily economic life, consent to it, whether or not we approve of it. This is because of the increasing abstraction and unconsciousness of our connection to our economic sources in the land, the land-communities, and the land-use economies.

He is long past sleep now. His mind has begun to work on the agenda that it sets for itself, and he knows that he will not be able to stop it.

My Mind became the root of my life rather than its sublimation

I am trying to establish the outlines of an understanding of myself in regard to what was fated to be the continuing crisis of my life, the crisis of racial awareness--the sense of being doomed by my history to be, if not always a racist, then a man always limited by the inheritance of racism, condemned to be always conscious of the necessity not to be a racist, to be always dealing deliberately with the reflexes of racism that are embedded in my mind as deeply at least as the language I speak.

He has to reach down with his feet to tread the floor.

Man is spirit--that is all man needs to know; and spirit is triumphant over matter.

Max Tegmark in his book Our Mathematical Universe.

Ego is a brain function and as such mortal.

In spite of rationalism's disdain for the particular, the personal, and the unwholesome [the modern debunker's anecdotal], the drift of all the evidence we have seems to me to sweep us very strongly towards the belief in some form of superhuman life with which we may, unknown to ourselves, be co-conscious. We may be in the universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.

In the higher world, we don't live our lives, we wear them. And that's what it means to rise above life on the wings of objective love. That's where she was.

What is experienced from within cannot be categorized in concepts that have been developed for the external world of the senses.

In the case of lived experience, there is no difference between an object that is perceived and the eye that perceives it.

No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought.

In the real life-process, willing, feeling, and thinking are only different aspects.