Quotes About Consciousness

There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert: that have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. […] they say something to us, standing there not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness, emblems of the solitude in which a man comes to make decisions about himself.

He finds it extraordinary that on some mornings, just after he has woken up, as he bends down to tie his shoes, he is flooded with a happiness so intense, a happiness so naturally and harmoniously at one with the world, that he can feel himself alive in the present, a present that surrounds him and permeates him, that breaks through him with the sudden, overwhelming knowledge that he is alive. And the happiness he discovers in himself at that moment is extraordinary.

an exercise in the art of paying attention, and paying attention, Ferguson discovered, was the first step in learning how to be alive.

Toute la scène avait quelque chose d'imaginaire. J'étais conscient qu'elle était réelle, mais en même temps c'était mieux que la réalité, plus proche d'une projection de ce que j'attendais de la réalité que tout ce qui m'étais arrivé auparavant. Avec le temps, je commençai à remarquer que les bonnes choses m'arrivaient que lorsque j'avais renoncé à les espérer.

He already understand that the world consisted of two realms, the visible and the invisible, and that the things he couldn't see were often more real than the things he could.

When a man walks into a room and you shake hands with him, you do not feel that you are shaking hands with him. Death changes that. This is the body of X, not this is X. The syntax is entirely different. Now we are talking about two things instead of one, implying that the man continues to exist, but only as an idea, a cluster of images and memories in the minds of the other people. As for the body, it is no more than flesh and bones, a heap of pure matter.

The human body lives in the mind of one who possesses a human body, and to live inside the human body possessed of the mind that perceives another human body is to live in a world of others.

I doubted that I would be able to sleep. There were too many things to digest, too many images churning in my mind, but the moment my head touched the pillow, I began to lose consciousness. I felt as if I'd been clubbed, as if my skull had been crushed by a stone. Some stories are too terrible, perhaps, and the only way to let them into you is to escape, to turn your back on them and steal off into the darkness.

The mind cannot win over matter, for once the mind is asked to do too much, it quickly shows itself to be matter as well.

It was one of the most sublimely exhilarating moments of my life. I was half a step in front of the real, an inch or two beyond the confines of my body, and when the thing happened just as I thought it would, I felt my skin had become transparent. I wasn't occupying space anymore so much as melting into it. What was around me was also inside me, and I had only to look into myself in order to see the world.

Existimos para nosotros mismos, quizá, y a veces vislumbramos quiénes somos, pero al final nunca podemos estar seguros, y mientras nuestras vidas continúan, nos volvemos cada vez más opacos para nosotros mismos, más y más conscientes de nuestra propia incoherencia

It was never possible for him to be where he was. For as long as he lived, he was somewhere else, between here and there. But never really have. And never really there.

the closest man can come to the feeling of eternity is by living in the present

The mind has a mind of its own.

Adesso poteva anche fare certe cose. Prima del 3 novembre sarebbe stato inconcepibile, ma il mondo irreale era molto più grande di quello reale, e c'era spazio abbondante per essere e non essere se stessi.

Die Welt ist in meinem Kopf. Mein Körper ist in der Welt.

Los pensamientos son reales —sentenció—. las palabras son reales. Todo lo humano es real, y aveces conocemos las cosas antes de que ocurran, aun cuando no seamos consientes de ello. Vivimos en el presente, pero el futuro está siempre en nosotros. Puede que el escribir se reduzca a eso, Sid. No a consignar los hechos del pasado, sino a hacer que ocurran cosas en el futuro.

For what does it mean to look at something, a real object in the real world, an animal, for example, and say that it is something other than what it is? It is to say that each thing leads a double life, at once in the world and in our minds, and that to deny either one of these lives is to kill the thing in both its lives at once.

One would have to be nearly unconscious not to see, or at least not to feel, that the house was no longer the same. "Habit", as one of Beckett's characters says, "it's a great deadener", And if the mind is unable to respond to the physical evidence, what will it do when confronted with the emotional evidence?

Nikad nije umeo da bude tamo gde se nalazio. Jer ?itavog svog života, bio je negde drugde, izme?u tu i tamo. Ali nikada sasvim tu. I nikada sasvim tamo.

Ferguson was not yet five years old, but he already understood that the world consisted of two realms, the visible and the invisible, and that the things he couldn't see were often more real than the things he could.

He olvidado qué era, dijo. Yo también, dijo Camier. Yo nunca lo supe, dijo Mercier.

One, mentioned in a 2017 Economist article, felt "sharper, more aware of what [the] body needs" on 1P-LSD,

All Vices and Bad Habits Referred to as "Phases" Not Responsible for Scratches, Dents, and Items Left in the Subconscious