Quotes About Consciousness

Vimes felt his hand begin to move of its own accord-- And stopped. Red rage froze. There was The Beast, all around him. And that's all it was. A beast. Useful, but still a beast. You could hold it on a chain, and make it dance, and juggle balls. It didn't think. It was dumb. What you were, what you were, was not The Beast.

My personal theory is that he has a very firm grasp upon reality, it's simply not a reality the rest of us have ever met before.

I imagine that fish have no word for water.

Tiffany's Second Thoughts said: Hang on, was that a First Thought? And Tiffany thought: No, that was a Third Thought. I'm thinking about how I think about what I'm thinking. At least, I think so. Her Second Thoughts said: Let's all calm down, please, because this is quite a small head.

It's a popular fact that 90 percent of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. . . . It is used. One of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary, to turn the unusual into the usual. Otherwise, human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing a stupid grin, saying "Wow," a lot. Part of the brain exists to stop this from happening.

Human beings, little bags of thinking water held up briefly by fragile accumulations of calcium...

What was it they said about the gods? They wouldn't exist if there weren't people to believe in them? And that applied to everything. Reality was what went on inside people's heads.

But if it is true that the act of observing changes the thing which is observed (because of Quantum), it's even more true that it changes the observer.

For wolves and pigs and bears, thinking that they're human is a tragedy. For a cat, it's an experience.

She is standing just behind you. Just behind your right shoulder. In the silence of the woods, Polly turned. I can't see her, she said. I am happy for you, said Wazzer, handing her the empty mug. But I didn't see anything, said Polly. No, said Wazzer. But you turned around...

Wizards had always known that the act of observation changed the thing that was observed, and sometimes forgot that it also changed the observer too.

most people don't set foot outside their own heads much.

I have seen galaxies die. I have watched atoms dance. But until I had the dark behind the eyes, I didn't know the death from the dance.

They live their lives as a sort of temporal blur around the point where their body actually is – anticipating the future, or holding on to the past. They're usually so busy thinking about what happens next that the only time they ever find out what is happening now is when they come to look back on it.

You humans are so good at ignoring things. You are almost blind and almost deaf. You look at a tree and see…just a tree, a stiff weed. You don't see its history, feel the pumping of the sap, hear every insect in the bark, sense the chemistry of the leaves, notice the hundred shades of green, the tiny movements to follow the sun, the subtle growth of wood...

One said, Tell us…what is it like? "What is what like?" One said, Being insane. Being human.

Imagine every moment being at one and the same time a distant memory and a nasty surprise and you'll see what I mean.

You couldn't think about how you thought. It was like opening a box with the crowbar that was inside.

I must always remember what's real.

But right now, as for my own philosophy, there is a quotation that rather sums it up: "When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.

Do my thoughts just dream of me?

The mind creates those things that exist.

When one of us says, "Look, there's nothing out there," what we are really saying is, "I cannot see.

We usually recognize a beginning. Endings are more difficult to detect. Most often, they are realized only after reflection. Silence. We are seldom conscious when silence begins—it is only afterward that we realize what we have been a part of. In the night journeys of Canada geese, it is the silence that propels them. Thomas Merton writes, "Silence is the strength of our interior life.… If we fill our lives with silence, then we will live in hope.