Quotes About Consciousness

A grande modificação que provoca em nós o despertar consiste menos em introduzir-nos na vida clara da consciência que em fazer-nos perder a lembrança da luz um pouco mais tamisada em que repousava a nossa inteligência, como no fundo opalino das águas.

Perhaps the immobility of the things around us is imposed on them by our certainty that they are themselves and not others, by the immobility of our mind confronting them.

Na realidade, todo leitor é, quando lê, o leitor de si mesmo. A obra não passa de uma especie de instrumento óptico oferecido ao leitor a fim de lhe ser possível discernir o que, sem ela, não teria certamente visto em si mesmo. O reconhecimento, por seu foro íntimo, do que diz o livro, é a prova da verdade deste [...].

The hierophant was not even conscious of my absence. When he heard of it, he was distressed: "What, you didn't see me carving the turkeys myself?" I replied that having failed, so far, to see Rome, Venice, Siena, the Prado, the Dresden gallery, the Indies, Sarah in Phèdre, I had learned to resign myself, and that I would add his carving of turkeys to my list.

When I saw any external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, enclosing it in a slender, incorporeal outline which prevented me from ever coming directly in contact with the material form;

for it is not only by dint of lying to other people, but also by lying to oneself that one ceases to be aware that one is lying,

A necessidade de falar impede não só de escutar mas também de ver, e nesse caso a ausência de qualquer descrição do meio exterior é já uma descrição de um estado interno.

Some philosophers argue that the external world does not exist and that it is only within ourselves that our lives evolve. Be that as it may, love, even in its humblest beginnings, is a striking example of how little reality means for us. If I had had to draw, describe or inventory the details of Mlle d'Éporcheville's features from memory, or even to recognize her in the street, I would have found it impossible.

And perhaps the resurrection of the soul after death is to be conceived as a phenomenon of memory.

Appreciate your life with greater intensity.

bij alles wat het stempel draagt van de werkelijke dood, die zo verschilt van zijn logische en abstracte mogelijkheid ...

Y, a partir de aquel instante, yo no tenía que dar ni un solo paso, el suelo caminaba por mí en aquel jardín

Ne dis pas : je vis maintenant, je mourrai demain. Ne divise pas la réalité entre la vie et la mort. Dis : maintenant je vis et je meurs.

The Word is alive. We have always known it. But it needs to be uttered, aloud or in the mind of a reader. Without a consciousness to tickle them into life, those books were dead.

Because before you acquired language, you didn't exist.

That spark of new creation, the new phrase that genuinely surprises, the act that bears the impress of a live consciousness: these are astonishingly rare. Human beings are everywhere overcome by rituals and dead language, by threadbare notions about what is real.

If you get run over as you cross the street perhaps you won't even realize it.

Perhaps without my always being fully conscious of it, the dishes continued to evolve, moving always toward a simpler, clearer expression of their primary flavors, and toward a steadily diminishing dependence on cooking fat.

There is always more to this world than what you can see with your eyes.

There is an enormous difference between life and intelligent life.

We explain the world the way we think about it. There's no way out of our minds.

Yo soñé que soñaba. Y soñé que despertaba del segundo sueño, del sueño soñado y decía: "Ah, fue un sueño", y creía estar despierto. Quizá la vida sea eso, un sueño metido dentro de otro. Quizá la vida sea el tercer sueño concéntrico del que uno despierta cuando se muere.

A man is a little soul carrying around a courpse.

Life itself is neither good nor evil, but only a place for good and evil.