Quotes About Consciousness

And as you read, you are not conscious of the letters or even of the words or even of the syntax or the sentences and punctuation, but only of their meaning. As you listen to an address, phonemes disappear into words and words into sentences and sentences disappear into what they are trying to say, into meaning. To be conscious of the elements of speech is to destroy the intention of the speech.

Thinking, then, is not conscious. Rather, it is an automatic process following a struction and the materials on which the struction is to operate.

language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication

Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world…concrete metaphors increase enormously our powers of perception of the world about us and our understanding of it, and literally create new objects.

Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.

Alfred Russel Wallace, the codiscoverer of the theory of natural selection. Following their twin announcements of the theory in 1858, both Darwin and Wallace struggled like Laocoöns with the serpentine problem of human evolution and its encoiling difficulty of consciousness. But where Darwin clouded the problem with his own naivete, seeing only continuity in evolution, Wallace could not do so.

And why are we least conscious when doing something most habitual? Certainly this seesawing relationship between consciousness and actions is something that any theory of consciousness must explain.

And when we fall, God quickly lifts us up, leaping out into our lives like a mother playing peek-a-boo with her child, reassuring the baby with her touch. And when we have been strengthened by God's action in our lives, then we choose with all our consciousness to serve God and be God's lovers, endlessly. But

Real life isn't a dream. You have to keep your eyes open. Ears too.

I became conscious of the fact that I would never experience that blissful optimism again. I would not be courageous enough to have another child. I wasn't even sure I would ever be brave enough to love someone

Black_Venus: Here it goes: Curious mosaic Continental drift Parabolic metaphor Elemental rift Time and transposition Conscious intermission Assertion? Desertion -- Black_Venus: That's all I have so far. You finish it. Me: How about "Spanish Inquisition.

You are what you eat. What would YOU like to be?

Sometimes our blessings are limited. There is a tangible poverty that surrounds us. We are not offered an obvious tapestry of choices. Still, even when the choices seem bleak between a tiger's teeth or deadly fall -- every moment offers up some third options (the true potentiality within the situation), and it is in our choices (conscious or not) that a future harvest depends.

Philosophy, which formerly raised man to feel conscious of himself because he was a thinking being and to say, I think therefore I am, now raises him to say I think, therefore I am not, (unless he takes thought into consideration only in that humble region where it is confused with action).

This stretch through the fogbound forest gradually lulled Grange into his favorite daydream; in it he saw an image of his life: all that he had he carried with him; twenty feet away, the world grew dark, perspectives blurred, and there was nothing near him but this close halo of warm consciousness, this nest perched high above the vague earth.

Sometimes we do things, without thinking, that make no sense to us until much later, and yet appear to have been prompted by the most alert part of our being.

But there is one thing you must remember, if you forget all else. There is no good or evil, save in the way you see the world. There is no dark or light save in your own vision. All changes in the blink of an eyelid; yet all remains the same.

A dream is the key that unlocks the mysteries of the waking world...

Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.

You're like a witness. You're the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you're in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I'm a painting. Rocamadour is a painting. Etienne is a painting, this room is a painting. You think that you're in the room but you're not. You're looking at the room, you're not in the room.

memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.

Estoy tan solo como este gato, y mucho más solo porque lo sé y él no.

Hablar de despertarse cuando por fin se está tan bien así dormido.

Esto es la realidad. Esto que acepto a cada momento como la realidad y que no puede ser, no puede ser.