Quotes About Consciousness

Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?

We cannot think first and act afterward. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.

But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge.

We cannot think first and act afterwards. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action and can only guide it by taking thought.

As soon as high consciousness is reached, the enjoyment of existence is entwined with pain, frustration, loss, tragedy. Amid the passing of so much beauty, so much heroism, so much daring, Peace is then the intuition of permanence. It keeps vivid the sensitiveness to the tragedy; and it sees the fineness beyond the faded level of surrounding fact. Each tragedy is the disclosure of an ideal: What might have been, and was not; What can be. The tragedy was not in vain.

From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.

In so far as your metaphysical beliefs are implicit, you vaguely interpret the past on the lines of the present. But when it comes to the primary metaphysical data, the world of which you are immediately conscious is the whole datum.

Explicitly in the verbal sentence, or implicitly in the understanding of the subject entertaining it, every expression of a proposition includes demonstrative elements. In fact each word, and each symbolic phrase, is such an element, exciting the conscious prehension of some entity belonging to one of the categories of existence.

If this is not done, future ages will certainly look back upon us as a people so immersed in the pursuit of wealth as to be blind to higher considerations.

The knowing consciousness is a form of the social consciousness, and should not therefore be viewed in isolation from psychology and human history.

What we perceive as the present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation.

Our thoughts make spirals in their world.

the majority of people go past the doors that are half ajar, thinking them closed, and fail to notice the faint stirrings of the great curtain that hangs ever in the form of appearances between them and the world of causes behind.

So convinced was he that the external world was the result of a vast deception practised upon him by the gross senses, that when he stared at a great building like St. Paul's he felt it would not very much surprise him to see it suddenly quiver like a shape of jelly and then melt utterly away, while in its place stood all at once revealed the mass of colour, or the great intricate vibrations, or the splendid sound—the spiritual idea—which it represented in stone.

The situation called for a courage and calmness of reasoning that neither of us could compass, and I have never before seen so clearly conscious of two persons in me-the one that explained everything, and the other that laughed at such foolish explanations, yet was horribly afraid.

All his life he had realised that his senses brought to him merely a more or less interesting set of sham appearances; that space, as men measure it, was utterly misleading; that time, as the clock ticked it in a succession of minutes, was arbitrary nonsense; and, in fact, that all his sensory perceptions were but a clumsy representation of real things behind the curtain—things he was for ever trying to get at, and that sometimes he actually did get at.

We must keep our minds quiet-it's our minds they feel.

Es imposible que tales potencias o seres hayan sobrevivido... hayan sobrevivido a una época infinitamente remota donde... la conciencia se manifestaba, quizá, bajo cuerpos y formas que ya hace tiempo se retiraron ante la marea de la ascendiente humanidad... formas de las que sólo la poesía y la leyenda han conservado un fugaz recuerdo con el nombre de dioses, monstruos, seres míticos de toda clase y especie...

For one single second I understood clearly that the past and the future exist actually side by side in one immense Present; that it was I who moved to and fro among shifting, protean appearances.

Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival... a survival of a hugely remote period when... consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes in forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity... forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds...

Body and spirit are twins: God only knows which is which.

Time travel is real, Daniel said. We do it all the time. Moment to moment, minute to minute.

Everywhere's a here, isn't it?