Quotes About Consciousness

Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan, for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.

Let us not forget this: when 'I raise my arm', my arm goes up. And the problem arises: what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?

Man has to awaken to wonder — and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him off to sleep again.

Wenn man unter Ewigkeit nicht unendliche Zeitdauer, sondern Unzeitlichkeit versteht, dann lebt der ewig, der in der Gegenwart lebt.

If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don't have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings.

Christianity is not a doctrine, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event an so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.

Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.

383. The argument I may be dreaming is senseless for this reason: if I am dreaming, this remark is being dreamed as well - and indeed it is also being dreamed that these words have any meaning.

Era proprio la mia quell'immagine intravista in un lampo? Sono proprio così io, di fuori, quando vivendo - non mi penso? Dunque per gli altri sono quell'estraneo sospeso nello specchio: quello, e non già quale io mi conosco: quell'uno lì che io stesso prima, scorgendolo, non ho riconosciuto. Sono quell'estraneo che non posso veder vivere se non così, in un attimo impensato. Un estraneo che possono vedere e conoscere solamente gli altri, e io no.

Io non potevo vedermi vivere

Ah, to be no longer conscious of being, like a stone, like a plant! To remember no longer even one's own name! Stretched out upon the grass, hands interlaced at the back of one's neck, to look up at the dazzling, sun-puffed clouds as they sail past in the blue sky, to listen to the wind which makes, up there in the chestnut grove, a sound like the breaking of the sea.

Ours is an immutable reality which should make you shudder when you approach us if you are really conscious of the fact that your reality is a mere transitory and fleeting illusion, taking this form today and that tomorrow

when you are in front of a mirror, the moment you look at yourself again, you are no longer alive.

Why must I, this being, be like this? In life, I had formed for myself no image of myself. Why, then, must I see myself in that body there, why must I see in it an inevitable image of myself?

The goldfinch sings in its cage between the curtains upon the window-shelf. Can it be that it is conscious of the approaching springtime? Ah, it may be that the nearness of the spring is similarly felt by the old walnut bough from which my chair was made, which now creaks to the goldfinch's song. And it may further be that, by means of the song and the creaking, the imprisoned goldfinch and the walnut made into a chair understand each other.

Eu já não tenho essa necessidade, pois morro a cada instante, eu, e renasço novo e sem recordações: vivo e inteiro, já não dentro de mim, mas em cada coisa fora de mim.

What everyone fails to notice, when talking to the other humans, to mothers and lovers and strangers in the streeet, is the one obvious point: 'future corpse, future corpse.

If our consciousnesses can conceive it or our hearts grieve it, someone has composed a reference tidily summing the perfunctory steps to enlightenment. It would seem that we have merely traded one saviour for another, another someone to tell us how. We

Think about this for a moment. Your self-image, your idea of who you are, is just that-an image. Does it really exist? If you are not your ego, then who are you?

I am not suggesting that a bird, say, with her fleet heart, experiences more in a short life of three years than we do in that same period but that her actual perceived life may be longer than three years. The measure is mysterious; the time of the bird's life expands beyond our typical calculation in ways that we cannot understand, at least not yet. is it possible that some people, too, experience this time/space portal, allowing more experience to billow within and around them?

Vigilance fled in old age and man was like the other animals then, who science said could not see themselves. Here man was fully animal again, but he was still tender... you never lost what you were, never lost it fully. There was always the suspicion of a past life that faded and returned.

i didn't know there were different lines of aliveness, and two worlds contained by each other.

The thing i call 'my mind' seems to be kind of like a landlord that doesn't really know its tenants.

Divine had meant to try to shut her mind off from his sooner than she had, but had got wrapped up in the passion she'd so carefully stirred to life in them both and left it just that one second or two too long. Instead of remaining conscious as she'd hoped, she'd ended up passing out with him.