Quotes About Consciousness

it stands behind me like a boneless ghost and depends on me alone to lend it my flesh.

Nous, nous battions des paupières. Un clin d'Å"il, ça s'appelait. Un petit éclair noir, un rideau qui tombe et qui se relève : la coupure est faite. L'Å"il s'humecte, le monde s'anéantit. Vous ne pouvez pas savoir combien c'était rafraîchissant. Quatre mille repos dans une heure. Quatre mille petites évasions.

When you want to understand something you stand in front of it, alone, without help: all the past in the world is of no use. Then it disappears and what you wanted to understand disappears with it.

Ce qu'il y a, c'est que je pense très rarement; alors une foule de petites métamorphoses s'accumulent en moi sans que j'y prenne garde et puis, un beau jour, il se produit une véritable révolution. C'est ce qui a donné à ma vie cet aspect heurté, incohérent.

She takes her pleasure and I am no more for her than if I had never met her; she has suddenly emptied herself of me, and all other consciousness in the world has also emptied itself of me.

At the age of twenty, without experience or advice, my mother was torn between two moribund creatures. Her marriage of convenience found its truth in sickness and mourning... Upon the death of my father, Anne-Marie and I awoke from a common nightmare. I got better. But we were both victims of a misunderstanding: she returned lovingly to the child she had never left; I regained consciousness in the lap of a stranger.

Man is defined as the choices he must make. Very well. Above all else, he exists in the present moment, and beyond natural determinism; he does not define himself prior to his existence, but does so according to his individual present.

Now I knew: things are entirely what they appear to be—and behind them . . . there is nothing.

Her ÅŸey dopdolu, varoluÅŸ her yerde yoÄŸun, a??r ve tatl?. Ama bütün bu tatl?l???n ard?nda, ele geçmez, yak?n ama yine de uzak, genç, ac?mas?z ve durgun ÅŸu... Evet, ÅŸu eÄŸilip bükülmezlik var.

it is not only oneself that one discovers in the cogito, but also the existence of others.

At one point, Roquentin realizes that the seat he is on is a seat only by name: "it could just as well be a dead donkey. . . . Things are divorced from their names. They are there, grotesque, headstrong, gigantic, and it seems ridiculous to call them seats or say anything at all about them: I am in the midst of things, nameless things.

Suffering just means you're having a bad dream. Happiness means you're having a good dream. Enlightenment means getting out of the dream altogether.

The point is to wake up, not to earn a Ph.D. In waking up.

Enlightenment is the unprogrammed state.

The bottom line remains the same: you're either awake or you're not.One day, there it is. Nothing. No more enemies, no more battles.

Enlightenment isn't when you go there; it's when there comes here.

All fear is ultimately fear of no-self.

The you that you think of as you (and that thinks of you as you, and so on) is not you, it's just the character that the underlying truth of you is dreaming into existence. Enlightenment isn't in the character, it's in the underlying truth.

The end of illusion is the end of you.   U.G. Krishnamurti

In speech, the speaker and the listener have to be present in at least two senses:- A Present to the words in a spatial sense B Present at a particular moment in time in which the words are uttered. Therefore it seems that the speakers' thoughts are as close as possible to their words. The thoughts are present to the words. So speech offers the most direct access to consciousness. The voice can seem to be consciousness itself.

We are not consciously aware of most of the predictions made by the brain unless an error occurs. Trying to understand how the neurons in the neocortex make predictions led to the second discovery.

Your brain has made a model of the world and is constantly checking that model against reality.

Our reality is similar to the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis; we live in a simulated world, but it is not in a computer—it is in our head.

If the universe came into and out of existence and there were no brains to know it, did the universe really exist? Who would know?