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Quotes About Consciousness

Life is everything. Life is God. Everything changes and moves and that movement is God. And while there is life there is joy in consciousness of the divine. To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in innocent sufferings.
~ Leo Tolstoy
Time is an illusion of life; the life of the past and the future clouds men from the true life of the present.
~ Leo Tolstoy
Life is everything. Life is God. Everything is in flux and movement, and this movement is God. And while there is life there is pleasure in being conscious of the Godhead. To love life is to love God. The hardest and the most blessed thing is to love this life even in suffering, innocent suffering.
~ Leo Tolstoy
the chief if not the sole cause of the enslavement of the Indian peoples by the English lies in this very absence of a religious consciousness and of the guidance for conduct which should flow from it—a lack common in our day to all nations East and West, from Japan to England and America alike.
~ Leo Tolstoy
The longer Levin mowed, the more often he felt those moments of oblivion during which it was no longer his arms that swung the scythe, but the scythe itself that lent motion to his whole body, full of life and conscious of itself, and, as if by magic, without a thought of it, the work got rightly and neatly done on its own. These were the most blissful moments.
~ Leo Tolstoy
It seemed to each of them that the life he led himself was the only real life, and the life led by his friend was a mere phantasm.
~ Leo Tolstoy
Ferreting in one's soul, one often ferrets out something that might have lain there unnoticed.
~ Leo Tolstoy
Is there a line to be drawn between psychological and physiological phenomena in man? and if so, where?
~ Leo Tolstoy
The main thing he wanted to weep about was a sudden, vivid awareness of the terrible opposition between something infinitely great and indefinable that was in him, and something narrow and fleshy that he himself, and even she, was. This opposition tormented him and gladdened him while she sang.
~ Leo Tolstoy
His director told him, as material food was necessary for the body life, spiritual food is necessary for spiritual life. This was result of his consciousness of humility, certainty that whatever he had to do was right.
~ Leo Tolstoy
A man is never such an egotist as at moments of spiritual ecstasy. At
~ Leo Tolstoy
every man was conscious of his own insignificance, aware that he was but a grain of sand in that ocean of humanity, and yet at the same time had a sense of power as a part of that vast whole.
~ Leo Tolstoy
Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity. A deed done is irrevocable, and its result coinciding in time with the actions of millions of other men assumes an historic significance. The higher a man stands on the social ladder, the more people he is connected with and the more power he has over others, the more evident is the predestination and inevitability of his every action.
~ Leo Tolstoy
But just as the force of gravitation-in itself incomprehensible, though felt by every man- is only so far understood by us as we know the laws of necessity to which it is subject, so too the force of free will, unthinkable in itself, but recognized by the consciousness of every man, is only so far understood as we know the laws of necessity to which it is subject.
~ Leo Tolstoy
If the conception of freedom appears to reason a senseless contradiction, like the possibility of performing two actions at one and the same instant of time, or of an effect without a cause, that only proves that consciousness is not subject to reason.
~ Leo Tolstoy
I'm coming!' he cried joyfully, and that cry awoke him, but woke him up not at all the same person he had been when he fell asleep. He tried to get up but could not, tried to move his arm and could not, to move his leg and also could not, to turn his head and could not. He was surprised but not at all disturbed by this. He understood that this was death, and was not at all disturbed by that either.
~ Leo Tolstoy
There are two sides to each man's life: his personal life, which is the more free the more abstract its interests, and his elemental, swarmlike life, where man inevitably fulfills the laws prescribed for him. Man lives consciously for himself, but serves as an unconscious instrument for the achievement of historical, universally human goals.
~ Leo Tolstoy
For a long time afterwards, in prison, when moral change took place in me, I thought of that moment, recalled what I could of it, and considered it. I remembered for an instant, before the action I had a terrible consciousness I was killing a defenseless woman, my wife!
~ Leo Tolstoy
Remember then: there is only one time that is important - Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any real power.
~ Leo Tolstoy
O lo que yo llamaba racional no lo era tanto como había pensado, o lo que me parecía irracional no lo era tanto como había pensado.
~ Leo Tolstoy
Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity.
~ Leo Tolstoy
When he did not think, but simply lived, he was continually aware of the presence of an infallible judge in his soul, determining which of two possible courses of action was the better and which was the worse, and as soon as he did not act rightly, he was at once aware of it.
~ Leo Tolstoy
your consciousness of existence is derived from the conjunction of all your sensations, that that consciousness of existence is the result of your sensations.
~ Leo Tolstoy
assuming there are no sensations, it follows that there is no idea of existence.
~ Leo Tolstoy