Quotes About Consciousness

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace

It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves.

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us deep down. It's our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of.

Puede ser apropiado hacer algo temible sin pensarlo, pero no cuando lo temible es el propio hecho de no pensar

But if we can't think ourselves, ... that means we, ourselves, are things that can't think themselves, and so are the proper objects for our thought; we fulfill the game's condition, we are ourselves Other. So if we can think ourselves, we can't; and if we can't; we can. KABLAM, ... There go the old crania.

The big thing (that really good fiction) can do is leaping over that wall of self and portraying inner experience and setting up a kind of intimate conversation between two consciousnesses . . . the trick is going to be trying to find a way to do it--and for a generation--whose relation to the long sustained, linear verbal communication is fundamentally different.

CONSCIOUSNESS IS NATURE'S NIGHTMARE

David Foster Wallace

The lie is that it's one or the other. A still, floating bee is moving faster than it can think. From overhead the sweetness drives it crazy.

No, she simply felt - at times, mind you, not all the time, but at sharp and distinctive intuitive moments - as if she had no real existence, except for what she said and did and perceived and et cetera, and that these were, it seemed at such times, not really under her control. There was nothing pure.

David Foster Wallace

What Mark Nechtr fears most: solipsistic solipsism: silence.

es la libertad que entraña la verdadera educación, el aprender a ser equilibrado: que puedes decidir conscientemente qué tiene sentido y qué no lo tiene. Puedes decidir a qué dioses adorar…

Tiene que ver con el verdadero valor de una verdadera educación, que no pasa por las notas ni los títulos y sí en gran medida por la simple conciencia: la conciencia de algo que es tan real y tan esencial, y que está tan oculto delante mismo de nuestras narices y por todas partes, que nos vemos obligados a recordarnos a nosotros mismos una y otra vez: «Esto es agua».

Ä°nsanÄŸlu yaÅŸam?n? sürdürme konusunda kayg? duymaya gerek kalmad???n? anlad???nda, isteyerek ve bilinçli bir ÅŸeklide gerçekleÅŸtirilirse makine iÅŸinden daha cazip olabilecek olan elle yap?lan iÅŸe ilgi göstermeyi ve elle yap?lan iÅŸten keyif almay? öÄŸrendiÄŸinde, makinelerin olaÄŸan ÅŸekilde a??r? kullan?m? bir süre sonra muhtemelen bir biçimde k?s?tlanacakt?r.

et tamen nihil est sciens vel quiescens, nisi actualiter sit sciens vel quiescens.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

O teach me how I should forget to think (1.1.224)

Are you sure That we are awake? It seems to me That yet we sleep, we dream

I dreamt a dream tonight. Mercutio: And so did I. Romeo: Well, what was yours? Mercutio: That dreamers often lie. Romeo: In bed asleep while they do dream things true.

Awake, dear heart, awake. Thou hast slept well. Awake.