Quotes About Consciousness

No man can ever feel his own identity aright excepr his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essence, though light be more congenial to our clayey part.

But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul

In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at best; whencesoe'er I came; wheresoe'er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights.

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!

are you breathing, are you lucky enough to be breathing

Suppose within each book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place. Suppose the human skull were to become capacious, spaces opening inside it, humming chambers like beehives.

It's kinda cool to think about you as a real person, instead of some fetus ghost.

There was a world ... or was it all a dream?

let not forgetfulness take you, after you are released from the kindly sweet slumber.

The democratic principle, enunciated in the words of the Declaration of Independence, declared that government was secondary, that the people who established it were primary. Thus, the future of democracy depended on the people, and their growing consciousness of what was the decent way to relate to their fellow human beings all over the world.

I see policemen on horses galloping through the crowd, and hitting people. While I'm just taking this in, I am spun around and hit, on the side of the head, and knocked out. It had suddenly come home to me that, hey, I guess the police are not neutral. I guess the government is not neutral. . . . It was a turning point in my political consciousness.

It was the job of education, he said, to smash through this make-believe and give black people a realistic picture of themselves and of the world.

All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.

Jesus! Did I SAY that? Or just think it? Was I talking? Did they hear me? I glanced over at my attorney, but he seemed oblivious...

Though I was careful never to mention it, I began to see a new dimension in everything that happened.

Consciousness Expansion" went out with LBJ … and it is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with Nixon.

No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride … and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well … maybe chalk it off to forced consciousness expansion:

you can get a lot higher without drugs than with them.

This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling conciousness expansion without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously. After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him... but there is not much satisfaction in knowing that he blew it very badly for himself, because he took too many others down with him.

And indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives. So few people understand this! Think of any decision you've ever made which had a bearing on your future: I may be wrong, but I don't see how it could have been anything but a choice however indirect — between the two things I've mentioned: the floating or the swimming.

No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride … and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well … maybe chalk it off to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten. It's all in Kesey's Bible.… The Far Side of Reality.

As the Siamese says: Pea rattles loud in empty head.

Hinduism advises such people not to try to think of God as the supreme instance of abstractions like being or consciousness, and instead to think of God as the archetype of the noblest reality they encounter in the natural world.

These are what people really want, and they want them infinitely. To state the full truth, then, we must say that what people really would like to have is infinite being, infinite knowledge, and infinite bliss. Moksha is the release from the finitude that restricts us from the limitless being, consciousness, and bliss we desire.