Quotes About Consciousness

I wonder as to the value of consciousness," said Jack, "if it does not change the nature of a beast.

Before you are fully aware of anything else, you are aware whether you are awakening in your own bed.

Hell, we make our own ifs. I had better things to think about than what could have happened

What is the true father of a man? The circumstances which brought together the two bodies which begat him? Was it the fact that, for some reason, at one moment in time, these two pleased one another beyond any possible alternatives? If so, why? Was it the simple hunger of the flesh, or was it curiosity, or the will? Or was it something else? Pity? Loneliness? The desire to dominate? What feeling, or what thought was father to the body in which I first came into consciousness?

Each day recapitulates the history of the world, coming up out of darkness and cold into confused light and beginning warmth, consciousness blinking its eyes somewhere in midmorning, awakening thoughts a jumble of illogic and unattached emotion, and all speeding together toward the order of moontide, the slow poignant decline of dusk, the mystical vision of twilight, the end of entropy that is night once more.

I can see through Shadow, Corwin.

Few people can say of themselves that they are free of the belief that this world which they see around them is in reality the work of their own imagination. Are we pleased with it, proud of it, then?

Something was approaching from beyond the shrub-lined bend. His stream of consciousness fell still. His was now the passive eye of the hunter, discerning everything before it without reflection. His breathing slowed even further. Time ceased to exist. Now .

To see someone who does not see is the best way to be intensely aware of what he does not see.

I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double. Heautoscopy was compared with an hallucinosis; for centuries this was a great mythic theme.

In 1850, August Salzmann photographed, near Jerusalem, the road to Beith-Lehem (as it was spelled at the time): nothing but stony ground, olive trees; but three tenses dizzy my consciousness: my present, the time of Jesus, and that of the photographer, all this under the instance of 'reality' — and no longer through the elaborations of the text, whether fictional or poetic, which itself is never credible down to the root.

Sartre) (The world is full without me, as in Nausea; the world plays at living behind a glass partition; the world is in an aquarium; I see everything close up and yet cut off, made of some other substance; I keep falling outside myself, without dizziness, without blue, into precision.

The photograph touches me if I withdraw it from its usual blah-blah: "Technique," "Reality," "Reportage," "Art," etc.: to say nothing, to shut my eyes, to allow the detail to rise of its own accord into affective consciousness.

el miedo es a la vez lo que está "en el origen de todo", una parodia del cogito cartesiano: "Tengo miedo, luego vivo"– y

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. —DONALD RUMSFELD

We need to live our experience as it is and with our eyes open. The universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not.

Indeed, the best answer I have ever heard to the question of what it would be like to be dead (i.e., be nonbeing) is to imagine how it felt to be before you were conceived.

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.

This makes it sound as if light has intentionality, and I resisted the temptation to say light considers all paths and chooses the one that takes the least time because I fully expect that Deepak Chopra would later quote me as implying that light has consciousness.

I wish my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me;

When you've knocked someone unconscious, put him into the recovery position. If you want him to recover.

She closed her eyes and opened them a moment later, like she was erasing the conversation from her memory.

You can't be real-world smart and real-world dumb, all at the same time. You can't be rational and irrational. You can't deal with reality and simultaneously not deal with it.

presence. No