Quotes About Consciousness

Yet within a few minutes of waking, that country of dream has gone, its taste and reality has drained away into ordinary life. All you have left is an intellectual conviction held in a set of words. You want to remember. You try to remember. You have a set of words to offer your friend, or repeat to yourself. But the reality has gone, evaporated.

Secondo me, a farti ricordare qualcosa, di importante o meno, è il fatto che in quel momento eri particolarmente vigile, attento. Per la maggior parte del tempo viviamo in una sorta di trance, non facciamo caso a niente.

The truth was, she was becoming more and more uncomfortably conscious not only that the things she said, and a good many of the things she thought, had been taken down off a rack and put on, but that what she really felt was something else again.

The thing is, people who are indeed frothing mad, if they are in political or religious contexts are not seen as mad. Yet if the same people were in a different context, it would be seen at once. But some people who are crazy drift towards political or religious movements where their craziness will not be seen, and whether they do this consciously or not surely doesn't matter.

Las palabras aparecen en tu mente y allí bailan a ritmos de los que tú conscientemente nada sabes. Cabos y rabos de palabras: pueden ser una indicación de un estado de ánimo oculto. Pueden removerse o cantar durante días, enloqueciéndote. Pueden ser como película invisible, como pelicula adhesiva, entre tú y la realidad.

I wish I hadn't become so conscious of everything. Once I wouldn't have noticed: now every conversation, every encounter with a person seems like crossing a mined field; and why can't I accept that one's closest friends at moments stick a knife in, deep, between the ribs?

He didn't consciously bring Brub to memory. It was one of those minnows of thought, darting through the unruffled pond of his thinking.

A mind responsive to beauty is a storehouse with many rooms; words, sounds, textures, all the nobler exercises of the senses leave some image filed and folded to be summoned at need. There, too, the brutal images are kept: the sights and smells and hurts, real and imagined, which the responsive mind accepts and has bedded deep.

His horse stumbled in the tussocky ground and made him realize, then, how thoughtlessly fast he was riding...how thoughtlessly fast he was thinking.

Lymond said, 'Have I been talking?' 'We all have, in nightmares. But yours have not been about the sea.

I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether.

But sleep is only an illusion of weakness and, unless it appeals to our protective instincts, is likely to arouse in us a nasty, bullying spirit. From a height of conscious superiority we look down on the sleeper, thus exposing himself in all his frailty, and indulge in derisive comment upon his appearance, his manners and (if the occasion is a public one) the absurdity of the position in which he has placed his companion, if he has one, and particularly if we are that companion.

True,' replied Wimsey. 'As G. K. C. says, "I'd rather be alive than not".

Did I do anything wrong today, he said, or has the world always been like this and I've been too wrapped up in myself to notice?

How can I tell, said the man, that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?

It's unpleasantly like being drunk. What's so unpleasant about being drunk? You ask a glass of water.

In the great debate that has raged for centuries about what, if anything, happens to you after death, be it heaven, hell, purgatory or extinction, one thing has never been in doubt - that you would at least know the answer when you were dead.

Imagine he said, never even thinking, 'We are alone,' simply because it has never occurred to you to think that there's any other way to be.

For as long as he could remember, he'd suffered from a vague nagging feeling of being not all there.

Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.

Hey, er ... said Zaphod, what's your name? The man looked at them doubtfully. I don't know. Why, do you think I should have one? It seems very odd to give a bundle of vague sensory perceptions a name.

You mean, said Arthur, you mean you can see into my mind? Yes, said Marvin. Arthur stared in astonishment. And ...? he said. It amazes me how you can manage to live in anything that small.

There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambigiuous phyiscal universe.

The old me knew. The old me cared. Fine, so far so good. Except that the old me cared so much that he actually got inside his own brain--my own brain--and locked off the bits that knew and cared, because if I knew and cared I wouldn't be able to do it.