Quotes About Consciousness

Nadie sabe lo que hace mientras actúa correctamente, pero de lo que está mal uno siempre es consciente.

Allwissend bin ich nicht; doch viel ist mir bewusst.

Weil du die Augen offen hast, glaubst du, du siehst.

Non si accorge che il cuore le batte, che le vacillano i piedi, che i sensi minacciano di lasciarla.

I wrote the book almost unconsciously, like a somnambulist, and was amazed when I realized what I had done.

Acknowledging that you do not have complete free will, or complete conscious control, actually increases the amount of free will and control you truly have.

On any given day, how much of what we say, feel, and do is under our conscious control? More important, how much is not? And most crucial of all: If we understood how our unconscious worked—if we knew why we do what we do—could we finally, fundamentally know ourselves? Could insights into our hidden drivers unlock different ways of thinking, feeling, and acting? What might this mean for our lives?

By using unconscious means to self-regulate, making "necessary evils" such as healthy eating and exercising and studying a routine part of their lives, they make the positive activities a routine habit so that they don't need to fight to get started, or overcome the disinclination to do them. Conscious and effortful self-control is too taxing and too unreliable, and as we know, vulnerable to rationalizations and excuses.

If you could look far enough into the empty sky, you would be able to see the back of your own head.

Carrying such a tension of the opposites is like a Crucifixion. We must be as one suspended between the opposites, a painful state to bear. But in such a state of suspension the grace of God is able to operate within us. The problem of our duality can never be resolved on the level of the ego; it permits no rational solution. But where there is consciousness of a problem, the Self, the Imago Dei within us can operate and bring about an irrational synthesis of the personality.

The world is exactly like you think it is, and that's why.

The universe gives birth to consciousness, and consciousness gives meaning to the universe.

the past has no existence except as it is recorded in the present. (...) we would seem forced to say that no phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon. The universe does not 'exist, out there' independent of all acts of observation. Instead, it is in some strange sense a participatory universe

Well, there are certain stock words that I have found myself using a great deal. When I become aware of them, it is an alarm signal meaning I am falling back on something that has served in the past--it is a sign of not thinking at the present moment, not that there is anything intrinsically bad about certain words or phrases.

You bad birds, But God shall not punish you, you Shall be with us in heaven, though less Conscious of your happiness, perhaps, than we. Hell is a not quite satisfactory heaven, probably, But you are the fruit and jewels Of my arrangement . . .

We never live long enough in our lives to know what today is like. — John Ashbery, from "The Improvement," And the Stars were Shining (Noonday Press, 1994)

What I am looking for is not out there, it is in me. —Helen Keller

Ignorant people are controlled people, which is why five companies now have spent billions of dollars to control our mass media. Nothing will change until masses of people understand this.

There is a moment that comes in drunkenness, or on the far side of it, when, as is said to happen sometimes to the afflicted in the throes of a heart attack, I seem to separate from my body and float upward, and hang aloft, looking down on the spectacle of myself with disinterested attention.

Self knowledge is always bad news.

Seeing come before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.

Gerçekte hep iki zaman aras?nday?zd?r: Gövdenin ve bilincin zaman? aras?nda. Bütün öbür kültürlerdeki ruh ve gözde aras?ndaki ayr?m iÅŸte buradan kaynaklan?r. Öncelik her zaman ruhundur ve yeri bir baÅŸka zaman?n akt??? çizgidedir.

We have no word for this darkness. It is not night and it is not ignorance. From time to time we all cross this darkness, seeing everything: so much everything that we can distinguish nothing. You know it, Marisa, better than I. It's the interior from which everything came.

A drawing is a translation. That is to say each mark on the paper is consciously realted, not only to the real or imagined "model", but also to every mark and space already set out on the paper. Thus a drawn or painted image is woven together by the energy (or the lassitude, wen the drawing is weak) of countless judgements [sic]. Every time a figuration is evoked in a drawing, everything about it has been mediated by consciousness, either intuitively or systematically.