Quotes About Consciousness

In thinking the of the eternal, we must link the eternal with the accidentality of our thinking

Things have a life of their own. It's simply a matter of waking up their souls.

My freedom is not and cannot be something that I observe as I observe an outward fact; rather it must be something that I decide, moreover, without appeal. It is beyond the power of anyone to reject the decision by which I assert my freedom and this assertion is ultimately bound up with the consciousness that I have of myself.

We must, therefore, break away once and for all from the metaphors which depict consciousness as a luminous circle round which there is nothing, to its own eyes, but darkness. On the contrary, the shadow is at the centre.

The obscurity of the external world is a function of my own obscurity to myself; the world has no intrinsic obscurity. Should we say that it comes to the same thing in the end? We must ask up to what point this interior opacity is a result; is it not very largely the consequence of an act? and is not this act simply sin?

Je ne peux rien affirmer de moi-même qui soit authentiquement moi-même.

March 7th It is a serious error, if I am not mistaken, to treat time as a mode of apprehension. For one is then forced to consider it also as the order according to which the subject apprehends himself, and he can only do this by breaking away from himself, as it were, and mentally severing the fundamental engagement which makes him what he is.

Il est de toute nécessité que je perde conscience de la réalité individuelle de l'être que je puis être amené à supprimer.

What does it matter how cultivated and up-to-date we are, or how many thousands of books we've read? What matters is how we feel, how we see, what we do after reading; whether the street and the clouds and the existence of others mean anything to us; whether reading makes us, physically, more alive.

My yoga teacher says to think of your thoughts like skateboarders passing through our line of vision; just watch them go by, don't try to follow them down the street.

Once you get yourself out of the way, you can see everything the way it is. Your self isn't blocking the world from you, once you have sidestepped its shadow.

I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on . . . reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.

La mayor sabiduría que existe es conocerse a uno mismo.

I'm obsessed with not chucking away food. I'm lucky enough to have a gardener, so we grow sweetcorn, tomatoes, beetroots, cabbages, pumpkins, lettuce. I'm trying to get into blanching it and freezing so I don't have to buy veg over the winter, but then you need loads of freezers, and that's not ideal.

I think about what's going down my sink. So I won't pour oil down my sink. I won't - if I'm cleaning a pan, I'll wipe it and bin because I've seen - I've been down sewers.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

Through consciousness, our minds have the power to change our planet and ourselves. It is time we heed the wisdom of the ancient indigenous people and channel our consciousness and spirit to tend the garden and not destroy it.

Since Socrates and Plato first speculated on the nature of the human mind, serious thinkers through the ages - from Aristotle to Descartes, from Aeschylus to Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman - have thought it wise to understand oneself and one's behavior.

We all have that inner voice that is wise, even if we don't always follow it. It's that voice I'm trying to listen to.

I never think of myself as wise. I think of myself as possessing a critical intelligence which I intend to allow to operate.

Narrative has been part of human consciousness for a long time. And if it has played a part in all those thousands of years, it will know a trick or two. It will be wise. It will be mischievous. It will be helpful. It will be generous.

My function as a writer is to provide an atmosphere in which people can think wisely about what we're doing on this planet.

You get to be wiser by storying the world and seeing it through other forms of consciousness than your own.

An animal takes freely anything that it wishes: it commits no sin and is not held responsible for its action because it knows no better. But as soon as the idea of 'mine' and 'thine' has been imprinted upon our consciousness, then also the responsibility comes.