Quotes About Consciousness

I remember when there was no urge to cut the land or each other into pieces, when we knew how to think in beautiful. (Lines from Harjo's poem Emergence.)

Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.

There was a Greek philosopher who taught that, of all things, not to have been born is the sweetest state. But I believe sleep is the sweetest state. You're dead, yet alive. There's no sensation so exquisite.

What does it mean to be born? After we die, will it be the same thing as it was before we were born? Or a different kind of nothingness? Because there might be knowledge then. Memory.

I am the presence standing here at this juncture of Time & Space- who else?

For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.

You can't deny Eros. Eros wills trike, like lightning. Our human defenses are frail, ludicrous. Like plasterboard houses in a hurricane. Your triumph is in perfect submission. And the god of Eros will flow through you, as Lawrence says, in the 'perfect obliteration of blood consciousness.

Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.

In that way you recall, suddenly, sharply, in daylight, a trace of a dream of the previous night--but even as you recall it, it begins to fade.

The surreal is as integral a part of our lives as the 'real,' although one might argue that, since the unconscious underlies consciousness, and we are continuously bombarded by images, moods, and memories from that uncharitable terrain, it is in fact more primary than the 'real.

For once a truth is known it cannot be unknown, it can only be denied.

To seek out, to study, to immerse oneself in, surround oneself with, beauty; to be conscious of one's dependence upon those who create it or, like the performing musician, re-create it. Very little matters apart from this.

Not hearing impaired but just not hearing which is a way of not caring.)

F]or, living our lives, as our bodies live for us, we are not at all clockwork; we do not feel ourselves to be clockwork; each second is new to us, quicksilver and unexpected, undefined.

It is that time he cannot realize—he is still alive. He is laughing and his face is bright-glaring with happiness because he is alive and cannot imagine any time when he will be not-alive for (it is said) no animal can comprehend its own death.

Fascinating to Hannah, who has constructed her life as a means of exploiting her own passivity, to be forced to see how free she is: how alert, excited, aroused and aware and in a state of anticipation she really is, and not "fated.

But oh!—this so queer sensation between my eyes, in my lower forehead—is it the third eye, of enlightenment? Opening, at last?

She'd perfected a method of not-seeing which was a kind of reverse social radar.

First principle of life: Breathe.

The striking thing about self-knowledge is that it may be lacking.

La desesperación es una enfermedad del espíritu, del yo, y puede adoptar, en consecuencia, tres formas: la desesperación de no ser consciente de tener un yo; la desesperación de no querer ser uno mismo; la desesperación de querer ser uno mismo.   SØREN KIERKEGAARD, La enfermedad mortal     La muerte de una hermosa niña de

The mind is often an area where people play around with sin.

Mary can't control her actions because she doesn't control her thoughts.

I like to say, "Nothing good happens accidently." You can catch disease, but you cannot catch health.