Quotes About Consciousness

We have to make machines understand what they're doing, or they won't be able to come back and say, 'Why did you do that?'

Everybody knows if you don't have an examined life, you go mad.

Yes, green business is good business. But it's not just about making money. It's about being responsible.

It's all about 'thought.' Whatever you think, wherever you think, that's pretty much how you're going to manifest yourself to the rest of the world.

When you pick up a House of Marley product, it's not just about the music; it's also about how it's created.

He is real, in his own way, Ann pointed out. After all, what's real? How do you know I'm real, or if you are?

To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses and what they can tell us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.

We can't enchant the world, which makes its own magic; but we can enchant ourselves by paying deep attention

We tend to think of memories as monuments we once forged and may find intact beneath the weedy growth of years. But, in a real sense, memories are tied to and describe the present. Formed in an idiosyncratic way when they happened, they're also true to the moment of recall, including how you feel, all you've experienced, and new values, passions, and vulnerability. One never steps into the same stream of consciousness twice.

I believe consciousness is brazenly physical, a raucous mirage the brain creates to help us survive. But I also sense the universe is magical, greater than the sum of its parts, which I don't attribute to a governing god, but simply to the surprising, ecstatic, frightening everyday reality we all know. Ultimately, I find consciousness a fascinating predicament for matter to get into.

Selves will accumulate when one isn't looking, and they don't always act wisely or well.

Like tiny islands on the horizon, they can vanish in rough seas. Even in calm weather, their coral gradually erodes, pickled by salt and heat. Yet they form the shoals of a life. Some offer safe lagoons and murmuring trees. Others crawl with pirates and reptiles. Together they connect a self with the mainland and society. Plot their trail and a mercurial past becomes visible. Memories feel geological in their repose, solid and true, the bedrock of consciousness.

Beware! said the peridxis's voice in her head. Don't let It's shadowy little truth overwhelm the greater one.

But how many other kinds of life are there that I could learn to feel? Who knows where thought is hiding? . . .

Sometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember.

I was in a kind of no-man's-land, a place between places. The mind plays all sorts of tricks, gets up to all kinds of things while we ourselves are slumbering in a white zone that looks for all the world like inattention to the onlooker.

Tú estás viva; pero estar viva no es lo mismo que vivir.

I know,' he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.

I wondered. What did she think of our attempts to persuader ourselves that this was life and that we were really living it?

There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic. When I at last woke up to myself, I could only guess what had been going on in the darkness of my unconsciousness.

And is it better to know?" he asked me. "I can't tell you. But once you know, it's impossible to go back.

We cannot know what entering sleep feels like, for by the time it is complete the ability to register it to memory is lost. But we all know the gently plummeting feeling that precedes falling asleep and gives it its name.

Cuando escribo, incluso ahora mientras estoy escribiendo esta frase, esta palabra, soy consciente de la presencia de un lector fantasma que se inclina sobre mi hombro y contempla mi pluma, que tergiversa mis palabras y distorsiona mi significado, haciéndome sentir incómoda incluso en la intimidad de mis propios pensamientos.

I did not see the wolf when he came. I did not hear him. There was only this: A little before dawn I became aware of a hush, and I realized that the only breathing to be heard in the room was my own.