Quotes About Consciousness

You can't imagine what it's like when every moment you're conscious you're in the most frightful pain.

She was dressed to go to bed only it was ridiculously early to go to bed. She desired to be unconscious.

There is so much grit in the bottom of the container, almost all our natural preoccupations are low ones, and in most cases the rag-bag of consciousness is only unified by the experience of great art or of intense love. Neither of these was relevant to my messy and absent-minded goings-on.

Ludens felt that everyone around him was living in the present, a place where he certainly could not live.

You daren't think, so you live in a dream.

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonizing preoccupation with self.

It's all a dream, he thought, one goes through life in a dream, it's all too hard.

Time had never been visible to him before.

He saw moving pictures. It was not quite like remembering.

For a while everything became too terrible, one could scarcely bear to be conscious.

If only one could believe that death was waking up.

We ignore what we are doing until it is too late to alter it. We never allow ourselves quite to focus upon moments of decision; and these are often in fact hard to find even if we are searching for them.

Moral concepts do not move about within a hard world set up by science and logic. They set up, for different purposes, a different world.

He had for many years now been spared the demons, though he was constantly aware of their continued presence. He could hear them, as it were, moving behind the wall. They belonged to him and would doubtless go with him to the grave. His mind too, like David's, ran irresistibly to the horror.

Why can't you live in the present? You live everywhere but in the present.

If Buddhists think evil is unreal they must be mad! Thinking evil is unreal is holding hands with evil under the table!

There was a kind of sleeping or half-sleeping which I sometimes tried to achieve (especially at weekends) when I lay like a floating turtle, just breaking the surface of consciousness, aware and yet not self-aware, not yet tormented by being a particular person.

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.

There's a kind of reality, a kind of truth.

He awoke the next morning to an instant consciousness of disaster.

The role of philosophy might be said to be to extend and deepen the self-awareness of mankind.

Being in love has its own self-certifying universality, it informs and glorifies the world with an energy which, like a drug, becomes a necessity of consciousness. Without it, the scene is dark, without that throbbing communication, dead. A mad state, perhaps an undesirable one, inimical to justice, benevolence, common sense. But, for its slaves, it justifies itself as, for the ordinary unsaintly man, nothing else ever does.

It's not even like memory. It's all just there. All the time, Willy? Every hour, every minute.

Ordinary consciousness simply becomes pain.