Quotes About Consciousness

I was inclined to think him Jewish," she wrote; she "considered his animus to be prompted only by his racial self-consciousness.

The world of human aspiration is largely fictitious and if we do not understand this we understand nothing about man.

Man is an animal who has to live in a lie in order to live at all.

Man has a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality, this self-consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature... Yet, at the same time... man is a worm and food for worms

We noted that the ego delays responses in order to permit a richer reaction: it allows the organism to choose between several alternatives, reviewed in awareness in lieu of immediate action.

But man is not just a blind glob of idling protoplasm, but a creature with a name who lives in a world of symbols and dreams and not merely matter. His sense of self-worth is constituted symbolically, his cherished narcissism feeds on symbols, on an abstract idea of his own worth, an idea composed of sounds, words, and images, in the air, in the mind, on paper.

We did not create ourselves, but we are stuck with ourselves.

In other words, the final terror of self-consciousness is the knowledge of one's own death, which is the peculiar sentence on man alone in the animal kingdom

This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression, and with all this yet to die.

Traditional religion turned the consciousness of sin into a condition for salvation; but the tortured sense of nothingness of the neurotic qualifies him now only for miserable extinction, for merciful release in lonely death.

Anxiety is the result of the perception of the truth of one's condition. What does it mean to be self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression--and with all this yet to die.

man can never securely know what absolute reality is.

This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, and excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression – and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax. . . What kind of deity would create such complex and fancy worm food?

The human ego would have to become strong enough to die; and strong enough to set aside guilt… . [F]ull psychoanalytic consciousness would be strong enough to cancel the debt [of guilt] by deriving it from infantile fantasy.7

Even in our passions we are nursery children playing with toys that represent the real world. Even when these toys crash and cost us our lives or our sanity, we are cheated of the consolation that we were in the real world instead of the playpen of our fantasies.

to become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life.

I can't stand it to think my life is going so fast and I'm not really living it.

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.

You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch. Yes. It's sort of what we have instead of God.

There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.

He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget. But I did not know that then, although I learned it later.

But I could tell thee of other things, Inglés , and do not doubt what thou simply cannot see nor cannot hear. Thou canst not hear what a dog hears. Nor canst thou smell what a dog smells. But already thou hast experienced a little of what can happen to man.

But why must all the operations in life be performed without an anesthetic?

He could see the fish and he had only to look at his hands and feel his back against the stern to know that this had truly happened and was not a dream.