Quotes About Consciousness

I calculated that if I live up to the age of 80, then I end up using 450 toothbrushes in my life. All that plastic! So I switched to bamboo toothbrushes years ago.

One year, my good deed started with deciding to give all my friends makeup from a cruelty-free cosmetics line that I love. I did this with the hope that they would love it as much as I do and end up switching their makeup over to that cruelty-free line forever.

Self-analysis is the sworn enemy of regret-free living.

I am much more aware of making the plot more original, avoiding contrivance, having the story matter much more. I used to think more about symbols consciously. Now I think much more about the story.

We emphasize that such a form of communication is not absent in man, however evanescent a naturally given object may be for him, split as it is in its submission to symbols.

Man only becomes independent of this physical world when he learns to consider the objects around him as symbols. He must, for this reason, seek to acquire a moral relationship to them.

A sympathetic parent might see the spark of consciousness in a baby's large eyes and eagerly accept the popular claim that babies are wonderful learners, but it is hard to avoid the impression that they begin as ignorant as bread loaves.

We subverted the entire premise of 'Westworld' in that our sympathies are meant to be with the robots, the hosts.

You stimulate the neo-cortex, it produces a symphony. But it's not just a symphony of perception. It's a symphony of your universe. Your reality.

Your 'hara' is here, where your uterus is if you're a woman, where the tummy sticks out if you're a man, the centre of gravity of the human body. It is the synthesis of our intellect, body and spirit, and by developing our consciousness of it, we can become incredibly rooted.

Saving animals is as simple as choosing synthetic alternatives instead of real fur.

Meditation is not following any system; it is not constant repetition and imitation. Meditation is not concentration.

Now, there are a very large number of bodily movements, having their source in our nervous system, that do not possess the character of conscious actions.

What does it mean, exactly, for a given system to be a 'neural correlate of consciousness'?

If I were fully conscious of my surroundings at this moment, I would describe the light through the window, the way it searches out the apples in the glass bowl, buffing them to an unnatural sheen. I bought them for their fragrance, not their freshness, so even if you were to close your eyes, you'd know you were in the presence of apples. You would smell the heavy softening, the sweet rotting where apple ends and cider begins.

there are pleasures to be had from books beyond being lightly entertained. There is the pleasure of being challenged; the pleasure of feeling one's range and capacities expanding; the pleasure of entering into an unfamiliar world, and being led into empathy with a consciousness very different from one's own; the pleasure of knowing what others have already thought it worth knowing, and entering a larger conversation. ( The New Yorker , 13 Aug 2014)

Life, basically, is a nightmare until you learn to control the dream.

to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender...

Life is really just a bunch of nows, one after the other.

He nodded like he felt sorry for me and my stupid brain. 'I think that's probably because of your common sense. You can't accept the idea of arriving before you leave, the idea that every moment is happening at the same time, that it's us who are moving—' Enough was enough.

She should have known better than to entertain such thoughts, she told herself later. She knew how powerful telepathy could be, conjuring or connecting with someone else's thought waves. It might not be scientific, but she, like most people, knew how real it was, from direct experience. When her landline rang, at ten minutes to nine, some part of her know instantly who it wa.

Reason's a thing we dimly see in sleep.

If you pay attention to the world, it's an amazing place. If you don't, it's whatever you think it is.

Have you ever felt that there was something going on in life that not everyone was aware of?