Quotes About Consciousness

Posso sapere (o ignorare) tutto quello che voglio, il mondo resta quello che è.

I guess it's always uncomfortable to discover you're not as individual as you thought. But it really bothered me. From one perspective, I was an independent animal, exercising free will in order to elicit predictable reactions from an inert vending machine. But from another, the vending machine was choosing to withhold snacks in order to extract predictable, mechanical reactions from young men. I couldn't figure out any objective reason to consider one scenario more likely than the other.

It was pointless to ponder who I was because I was whichever combination of chemicals happened to be sloshing around at that time. So I decided not to search for a true self. I decided to choose who I wanted to be.

What was it Like? What was what like? he said, although he knew. Quick, I imagine. But you must have perceived something. A split second of vanishing awareness. A grasping at a shrinking light. It was like being fucked in the brain.

She did not need now to forget what she had seen; and, not needing to forget it—thus are our brains fashioned—she was able to forget it.

She may not have had that conscious, separate, and quite explicit desire to be a mother with which modern playwrights credit every unmated member of her sex. But she did know that she could love. And

Isn't that all we are? Just a brain kept alive by a complex and vulnerable machine we call the body? The

In desperation I started jumping up and down, hitting my head against the ceiling, trying to jolt myself awake. "WAKEUPWAKEUPWAKEUP!

Not being shaved gives me the feeling I'm some sort of plant and I keep involuntarily feeling my chin.

To keep on looking at one's wristwatch, just in order to convince oneself that time is passing is absurd. Time has never yet stood still just because a person is bored and stands at the window, not knowing what he is thinking.

Wenn die Haut empfindet, wie der Sand trocknet auf der Haut, wie die Sonne, wie der Wind, wie das ist für die Haut und das Hirn ... Er vergißt nicht seine Rolle, nicht die nächsten Verpflichtungen, die sich ergeben aus dieser Rolle; Termine, er vergißt nicht einmal die Weltlage. Es ist allerlei, was er nicht vergißt in dieser dünnen Gegenwart.

La gratitud es tener conciencia absoluta de los beneficios de la vida. Es la mayor de las virtudes.

But the greatest activity of life is well within your dominion. You can choose what you think about.

Maybe, if you had your way, your day would never end. Every moment demands to be savored. You resist sleep as long as possible because you love being awake so much. If you are like that, congratulations. If not, welcome to the majority.

Quiero hacer bien y no saber que lo hice.

Un santo feliz es aquel que es consciente, al mismo tiempo, de la gravedad del pecado y de la inmensidad de la gracia. El pecado no se reduce, ni tampoco la capacidad de Dios para perdonarlo. El santo mora en la gracia, no en la culpa. Así se define un alma tranquila.

Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a 'real' experience.

Skill in any performance whether it be in sports in playing the piano in conversation or in selling merchandise consists not in painfully and consciously thinking out each action as it is performed but in relaxing and letting the job do itself through you. Creative performance is spontaneous and 'natural' as opposed to self-conscious and studied.

Conscious effort inhibits and 'jams' the automatic creative mechanism.

When I speak of life and love as expanding with age, sex seems the least important thing. At any age we grow by the enlarging of consciousness, by learning a new language, or a new art or craft (gardening?) that implies a new way of looking at the universe. Love is one of the great enlargers of the person because it requires us to take in the stranger and to understand him, and to exercise restraint and tolerance as well as imagination to make the relationship work.

How does one grow up?" I asked a friend the other day. There was a slight pause; then she answered, "By thinking.

Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world.

The hardest thing we are asked to do in this world is to remain aware of suffering, suffering about which we can do nothing. Every human instinct is to turn away. Not see. It is, I'm afraid, exemplified by Reagan who refuses to imagine the suffering of twelve million unemployed and the degradation of men and women who are deprived of work and treated in this country like pariahs.

Anne lives each moment of the day as if it were the first and the last, with the whole of herself.