Quotes About Consciousness

We need a sort of reverse mirror test. Some way to identify those species smart enough to see themselves when they look at someone else. Bonus points for how far out the chain you can go. Double bonus points for those who get all the way to insects.

We call them feelings because we feel them. They don't start in our minds, they arise in our bodies.

It might be slow, Derrida said, but eventually the spectacle of our abuse of animals will be intolerable to our sense of who we are.

solipsism. According to solipsism, reality exists only inside

My attention determines the depth and quality of my experience.

Humans believed they thought things consciously when most of the time they were simply rationalizing instinctive reactions as basic as the amoeba's, and after those reactions had already taken place.

People who wouldn't dream of drowning a puppy in a barrel full of water think nothing of killing a fish the same slow way.

anything that was aware of its actions was capable of making choices about them.

Consciousness is that annoying time between naps.

En eso consistía la vida: nunca te das cuenta de lo que pasa hasta que te detienes un momento para observarlo con calma.

Existing without or separated from the body.

The typical human life seems to be quite unplanned, undirected, unlived, and unsavored. Only those who consciously think about the adventure of living as a matter of making choices among options, which they have found for themselves, ever establish real self-control and live their lives fully.

L'homme ne prend conscience de son être que dans les situations limites. [Autobiographie philosophique (1963)]

Je tÃ…â"¢eba rozliÅ¡ovat dvojí: vÄ›domí viny a uznání nÄ›jaké instituce na svÄ›tÄ› jako soudce.

Philosophical activity is fully real only at the summits of personal philosophizing, while objectivized philosophical thought is a preparation for, and a recollection of, it.

We are more than all our knowledge. What we know confronts an infinitely encompassing unknown. The world is a mystery, and each of us is a mystery to himself.

Az ember alapjában véve több annál, mint amit megtudhatunk róla.

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only therefore does it also exist for me; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men.

Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is indeed man's self-consciousness and self-awareness as long as he has not found his feet in the universe.

This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e., to recognise it by means of another interpretation....They forget however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world.

It is not social consciousness that determines social being, but social being that determines social consciousness.

Nicht das Bewußtsein bestimmt das Leben, sondern das Leben bestimmt das Bewußtsein.

Hay necesidad de una gran perspicacia para comprender que los conocimientos, las nociones y las concepciones, en una palabra, la conciencia del hombre, cambia con toda modificación sobrevenida en las relaciones sociales, en la existencia colectiva? ¿Qué demuestra la historia del pensamiento sino que la producción intelectual se transforma con la producción material?