Quotes About Consciousness

Love wasn't possible without a self, and nor was thinking.

The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return

Self-aware existence. I'm lucky to have it, but there are times when I think that I ought to know better what to do with it. What it's for. Sometimes it seems entirely pointless.

It was once convenient to think biblically, to believe we're surrounded for our benefit by edible automata on land and sea. Now it turns out that even fish can feel pain. This is the growing complication of the modern condition, the expanding circle of moral sympathy.

Early in my conscious life one of my fingers, not then subject to my influence, brushed past a shrimp-like protuberance between my legs. And though shrimp and fingertip lay at differing distances from my brain, they felt each other simultaneously, a diverting issue in neuroscience known as the binding problem.

Sex is a different medium, refracting time and sense, a biological hyperspace as remote from conscious existence as dreams, or as water is from air. As his mother used to say, another element; the day is changed, Henry, when you take a swim. And that day is bound to be marked out from all the rest.

I've heard it argued that long ago pain begat consciousness. To avoid serious damage a simple

The beginning of conscious life was the end of illusion, the illusion on no-being, and the eruption of the real. The triumph of realism over magic, of is over seems .

It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.

Sex is a different medium, refracting time and sense, a biological hyperspace as remote from conscious existence as dreams, or as water is from air.

To kill the brain is to kill the will to kill the brain.

The beginning of conscious life was the end of illusion, the illusion of non-being, and the eruption of the real. The triumph of realism over magic, of is over seems.

We'll always be troubled by how things are—that's how it stands with the difficult gift of consciousness.

The phrase was "in two places at once," and the memory was of early morning.

So, getting closer, my idea was To be. Or if not that, its grammatical variant, is. This was my aboriginal notion and here's the crux – is. Just that. In the spirit of Es muss sein. The beginning of conscious life was the end of illusion, the illusion of non-being, and the eruption of the real. The triumph of realism over magic, of is over seems.

The brain's fundamental secret will be laid open one day. But even when it has, the wonder will remain, that mere wet stuff can make this bright inward cinema of thought, of sight and sound and touch bound into a vivid illusion of an instantaneous present, with a self, another brightly wrought illusion, hovering like a ghost at its centre. Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?

There was never a time when he thought he was fully himself, and besides, he soon forgot that self and settled into a state of mild and extended psychosis...

This is what death is like. Less than nothing. Less than blackness. The edge of vision is a good representation of the edge of consciousness. Life then death. It's a foretaste.

What must it be, to burst out of deep infant sleep into the shocking singular fact of existence.

There are some decisions, even moral ones, that are formed in regions below conscious thought.

It was either hilarious or it was tragic, that people should go about their daily business in the conventional way when they knew there was this.

This book is written with the deep conviction that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine must become rooted in our memory and consciousness as a crime against humanity and that it should be excluded from the list of alleged crimes.

I'm conscious to know who I am as a young man and what I want to be off the field and how I want to impact other people.

You know how people say that young people feel immortal? I don't know what they're talking about. I was planning for how I would deal with my death in good conscience well before I even hit puberty.