Quotes About Consciousness

Things which we see are not by themselves what we see.

Space is an ineluctable modality of our perception (IMMANUEL KANT) …. Or perhaps is it, more essentially and explicitly than ever, ever-providing modalities? (Irene Doura-Kavadia)

are—and yet refer to something permanent, which must, therefore, be distinct from all my representations and external to me, the existence

We know nothing but our manner of perceiving [objects], a manner which is peculiar to us, and not necessarily shared by every being, even though it must be shared by every human being.

What things may be in themselves we do not know, nor need we care to know, because, after all, a thing can never come before me otherwise than as an appearance.

The understanding cannot intuit anything, the senses cannot think anything. Only from their union can knowledge arise.

Individual men and even entire peoples give little thought to the fact that while each according to this own ways pursues his own ends—often at cross purposes with each other—they unconsciously proceed toward an unknown natural end, as if following a guiding thread; and they work to promote an end they would set little store by, even if they were aware of it.

reason only perceives that which it produces after its own design;

Thus, if materialism is inadequate to explain my existence, then spiritualism is equally insufficient for this purpose.

iI Tempo non è altro che la forma dell'intuizione di noi stessi e del nostro stato interno

When men's fowls and dogs are lost, they know to seek for them again, but they lose their mind and do not know to seek for it.

There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.

Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.

Si se entiende por eternidad, no la duración temporal sin fin, sino la ausencia de tiempo, vive eternamente el que vive en el presente.

Only the deeper parts of the mind have so little sense of time.

There are mysterious agencies of the human mind which, like roving gases, travel the world, causing pain and mutilation, without their owners having any full awareness, or even any awareness at all, of the strength and the whereabouts of these exhalations... So it is that we can be terrors to each other, and people in lonely rooms suffer humiliation and even damage because of others in whose consciousness perhaps they scarcely figure at all.

Cuál es la diferencia que existe entre yo y estas pequeñas y humildes criaturas? La araña teje su tela, no puede hacer otra cosa. Yo tejo mi conciencia, esta charlatana compulsiva, esta voz vaga y errabunda que pronto enmudecerá. Pero todo es un sueño. La realidad es demasiado dura.

I tried deep breathing, but seemed to lose contact with myself between each breath, so that the next one was always an emergency. I began to feel faint.

Good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision.

Tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify while art tends to clarify. The good artist is a vehicle of truth Great art is able to display and discuss the central area of our reality, our actual consciousness, in a more exact way than science or even philosophy can.

Odd I should have said those words before and forgotten them. It makes one feel that human beings are just machines after all.

The human mind is a weird place.

Death is not the consummation of oneself but just the end of oneself. Before the self vanishes nothing really is, and that is how it is most of the time. But as soon as the self vanishes everything is, and becomes automatically the object of love. Love holds the world together, and if we could forget ourselves everything in the world would fly into a perfect harmony, and when we see beautiful things that is what they remind us of.

One forgot, one forgot. What hold had one on the past? The present moment was a little travelling in darkness.