Quotes About Consciousness

Mind and spirit together make up that which separates us from the rest of the animal world, that which enables a man to know the truth and that which enables him to die for the truth.

We take for granted how our mind puts everything together.

Sometimes her capacity for self-deception disturbed her.

It was in idleness that one came face-to-face with the I AM. With simple, elemental Being.

It was almost as if she had been lulled into a sleep long ago and had been hovering on the brink of waking but had resisted doing so. Sometimes it was more comfortable to remain asleep than to be awake.

When people live in denial of the truth—sometimes large groups of them all together—they lose their . . . I am not sure of the right word. They lose something precious, something good and right and true. Their integrity, perhaps? You forced everyone to confront the truth—even those who did not know it before

There was no conscious thought in her mind, no idea of what she would do if she could reach him in time.

Hunting isn't kosher," she told them. No one had heard of this before. She waved off her initial objection. "I don't keep kosher, as you know," she told them, a little embarrassed. "I still found it impossible to eat pork or shellfish, and I've never eaten game. But if you can kill the animal cleanly, I suppose it doesn't matter.

I watched voyeuristically, knowing I was peeping at people in the middle of a collective dream. I imagined myself among them, part of the regimental dance, the teacher's rosy heat, the huge mobile hope of happiness and vitality. And as I watched, it suddenly occurred to me I had been merely watching the world all my life.

Put your mind where your body is. One day at a time forces you to reckon with the instant you actually occupy, rather than living in fantasy la-la that never comes.

I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold.

A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. —Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

If you've got one foot in yesterday and one foot in tomorrow, you're straddling today—pissing all over it rather than living in it.

Buckled into the driver's seat, he adjusts the rearview with microscopic precision before even cranking the ignition—a care that opposes my haphazard plowing around in an uninspected Vega, its heater pumping out enough monoxide to give passengers a metallic-tasting headache.

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life? While the soul, after all, is only a window, and the opening of the window no more difficult than the wakening from a little sleep.

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul. That worrier.

And what has consciousness come to anyway, so far, that is better than these light-filled bodies?

Understand from the first this certainty. Butterflies don't write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn't mean they don't know, in their own way, what they are. That they don't know they are alive—that they don't feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily. Humility is the prize of the leaf-world. Vainglory is the bane of us, the humans.

Our hands, or minds, our feet hold more intelligence. With this I have no quarrel. But, what about virtue?

The question is, what will it be like after the last day? Will I float into the sky or will I fray within the earth or a river— remembering nothing? How desperate I would be if I couldn't remember the sun rising, if I couldn't remember trees, rivers; if I couldn't even remember, beloved, your beloved name.

I stood like Adam in his lonely garden On that first morning, shaken out of sleep, Rubbing his eyes, listening, parting the leaves, Like tissue on some vast, incredible gift.

I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can't really call being alive.