Quotes About Consciousness

Science can't predict what stories my children's great grandchildren will tell. The ultimate story about the experience of our journey into consciousness is a closed book to theologians and scientists alike, but it is not a book without promise. At this point we've barely cracked the introduction, and already smartass scientists and theologians pretend they know not just how the story started but how it ends—and worse—what it means or doesn't mean.

We are part of nature yet we have decided to be nicer than nature.

We now send our books, our music and even our memories into a cloud. We may or may not believe in God but we do once again believe in meaningful consciousness residing outside of ourselves.

Recycling has been little more than a comforting distraction from the stuff that really matters.

In 1988, a group of prominent homosexuals got together in Warrentown, Virginia, to map out their plan to get homosexuality accepted by the general public. In the book that resulted from their meeting, they revealed a strategy that achieves its effect "without reference to facts, logic or proof . . . the person's beliefs can be altered whether he is conscious of the attack or not."1

Remember you are just an extra in everyone else's play.

you can't get at a memory as you might get at a splinter. You can't poke about in your mind with a sterilized needle

If we look straight and deep into a chimpanzee's eyes, an intelligent self-assured personality looks back at us. If they are animals, what must we be?

Along with people in other creative professions, such as artists and musicians, many scientists experience this transcendence. I do so every day. For one, it's impossible to look an ape in the eye and not see oneself. There are other animals with frontally oriented eyes, but none that give you the shock of recognitions of the ape's. Looking back at you is not so much an animal but a personality as solid and willful as yourself.

Feelings arise when emotions penetrate our consciousness, and we become aware of them.

Along with people in other creative professions, such as artists and musicians, many scientists experience this transcendence. I do so every day. For one, it's impossible to look an ape in the eye and not see oneself. There are other animals with frontally oriented eyes, but none that give you the shock of recognition of the ape's. Looking back at you is not so much an animal but a personality as solid and willful as yourself.

Feelings happen when emotions bubble to the surface so that we become aware of them. When we are conscious of our emotions, we are able to express them in words and make others aware of them:

No self-respecting scientist would talk of "souls," but to deny animals any intelligence and consciousness came close enough.

The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. —Charles Darwin

Considering how much animals act like us, share our physiological reactions, have the same facial expressions, and possess the same sort of brains wouldn't it be strange indeed if their internal experiences were radically different?

I want the world to recognize with me the open door of every consciousness

ô mon corps, fait toujours de moi un homme qui s'interroge.

The consciousness of self is not the closing of a door to communication. Philosophic thought teaches us, on the contrary, that it is its guarantee. National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension.

slavery is opposed to work...work presupposes liberty, responsibility, and consciousness...the more intelligence you bring to your work, the more pleasure you will have in it.

21?At the last school prize-giving ceremony in Dakar, the president of the Republic of Senegal, Léopold Senghor, announced that negritude should be included in the school curriculum. If this decision is an exercise in cultural history, it can only be approved. But if it is a matter of shaping black consciousness it is simply turning one's back on history which has already noted the fact that most "Negroes" have ceased to exist.

nationalism is not explained, enriched, and deepened, if it does not very quickly turn into a social and political consciousness, into humanism, then it leads to a dead-end."23

No leader, no matter how valuable he may be, can substitute himself for the popular will; and the national government, before concerning itself about international prestige, ought first to give back their dignity to all citizens, fill their minds and feast their eyes with human things, and create a prospect that is human because human consciousness and sovereign men dwell therein.

All mental phenomena have in common, "that they are only perceived in inner consciousness, while in the case of physical phenomena only external perception is possible.

This passage indicates the step that Feuerbach has taken from idealism to materialism. He formulates the new thesis with a precision that points forward to Marx, when he says that it is not thought which determines being but, on the contrary, social being which determines the consciousness of men.