Quotes About Consciousness

For minds and cogitation are, to Leibniz, the ultimate reality, and unless the minds have free will, they are not minds at all but physical mechanisms numbly obeying deterministic rules.

some birds and marine mammals are able to switch off one half of their brain at a time, so that one half remains alert while the other is snoozing.

Il cervello è l'individuo. Il resto è un insieme di tubi e impalcature.

If you have a morbid fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth, there is a word for it: arachibutyrophobia… And there's a word for describing a sudden breaking off of thought: aposiopesis… When you are just dropping off to sleep and you experience that sudden sensation of falling, there is a word for it: it's a myoclonic jerk.

A runaway calendar will keep you from simplifying your life. It holds you hostage to tangible things—meetings, appointments, and projects—without giving proper priority to the intangibles: who you are becoming, your relationships with family and friends, your connectedness to God. Without conscious intervention, this pattern of chronically overscheduling ensures that the priorities you care about most will take a backseat to the urgent priorities of others every time.

A runaway calendar will keep you from simplifying your life. It holds you hostage to tangible things—meetings, appointments, and projects—without giving proper priority to the intangibles: who you are becoming, your relationships with family and friends, your connectedness to God. Without conscious intervention, this pattern of chronically overscheduling ensures that the priorities you care about most will take a backseat to the urgent priorities of others every time. GRABBING

Did you ever wonder if the person in the puddle is real, and you're just a reflection of him?

Thinking about the future and thinking about the past is really only a way of ignoring the present.

If the fact that brutes abstract not be made the distinguishing property of that sort of animal, I fear a great many of those that pass for men must be reckoned into their number.

The minute you can step outside yourself and look at yourself objectively, is when little voice mastery starts.

Everything that is incomprehensible does not cease to exist.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be miserable. A tree does not know itself to be miserable. It is then being miserable to know oneself to be miserable; but it is also being great to know that one is miserable.

If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.

Through space the universe grasps me and swallows me up like a speck; through thought I grasp it. (Page 21)

I can certainly imagine a man without hands, feet, or head, for it is only experience that teaches us that the head is more necessary than the feet. But I cannot imagine a man without thought; he would be a stone or an animal.

Tout notre raisonnement se réduit à céder au sentiment

What then is man to do in this state of affairs? Is he to doubt everything, to doubt if he is awake, whether he is being pinched or burned? Is he to doubt whether he is doubting, to doubt whether he exists? No one can go that far, and I maintain that a perfectly genuine sceptic has never existed.

Însa în cazul în care universul l-ar strivi, omul ar fi înca mai nobil decât ceea ce-l ucide; pentru ca el stie ca moare; iar avantajul pe care universul îl are asupra lui, acest univers nu-l cunoaste.

Thus men who are naturally conscious of what they are shun nothing, so much as rest; they would do anything to be disturbed.

Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

Man's greatness come from knowing he wretched: a tree does not know it is wretched. (21)

Omul nu este capabil sa vada nici nimicul din care provine, nici infinitul care-l impresoara.

Like a child standing in a beautiful park with his eyes shut tight, there's no need to imagine trees, flowers, deer, birds, and sky; we merely need to open our eyes and realize what is already here, who we already are - as soon as we stop pretending we're small or unholy.