Quotes About Consciousness

One should make his decisions within the space of seven breaths.

We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves.

...the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

Remember, no matter where you go, there you are. —Buckaroo Banzai

An altered state of consciousness simply means any state of awareness that is different from our normal waking state. When we daydream or dream at night, we are in an altered state. We can also get into an altered state by using meditations, hypnosis and exercises like jogging or yoga. Using drugs or alcohol can also produce an altered state, but in a less healthy way.

This is often the way one moves into the future. For what you begin to see, there is no ready language. If you were to remain silent, listen, perhaps in response you might be able to move in a new way. Glide into it slowly, aware of every slight difference, skin and cells intelligent, reading. But trained as you are in certain regimens, chances are you proceed directly according to the old patterns, trying again what was tried before.

Nancy Mairs, a contemporary thinker about disability and dying, wrests with "the psychological 'undeadness' of the dead—a consolatory consciousness of the beloved as present though elsewhere." Such a conviction reflects faith in death as the end of personal consciousness but the beginning of a translation "into an existence no less authentic for my inability to read it.

I know not who put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I myself am. I am in terrible ignorance of everthing. I know not what my body is, nor my senses, nor my soul, not even that part of me which thinks what I say, which reflects on all and on itself, and knows itself no more than the rest.

Whatever was about, whoever I had seen, and heard rocking, and who had passed me by just now, whoever had opened the locked door was not 'real'. No. But what was 'real'? At that moment I began to doubt my own reality.

I did not look about me, though sometimes I glanced up into the great bowl of the night sky and at the constellations scattered there and the sight was comforting and calming to me, things in the heavens seemed still to be aright and unchanged. But nothing else was, within me or all around. I knew now that I had entered some hitherto unimagined - indeed, unbelieved-in - realm of consciousness, that coming to this place had already changed me and that there was no going back.

On the delusional theory of consciousness

I haven't been that happy since I became conscious for the first time, you know, when I became aware of myself and got so uncomfortable and everything.

As each hour passes it's like a door has closed. You will never be able to revisit that hour to undo something you regret, or to do something you should have, so it's important to make the hour you are in the one that counts.

boredom is all about perception. It's a self-diagnosis, plain and simple. If you don't realize you're bored, you're not.

We are born knowing how to be just. And we die knowing we spent a lifetime pretending we didn't.

my life seemed more fully layered because of the choices I had made, both consciously and in ignorance. I

what we will hate. We decide what we will do with the love and hate. Every day we decide. It was this that revealed who we were, not the color of our flesh or the shape of our eyes or the language we spoke.

She rolled herself back so she wouldn't leave anything out. Sometimes time spread out like ink in water but it also had an order and one thing could not come without the other coming first.

I keep driving, slowly, hoping I'll remember where I'm going before I get there. So far I always have. Zen

Memory believes before knowing remembers. —William Faulkner, Light in August

Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual's consciousness is a collection of memories we've cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived. It is something that no one else can entirely share, one that burns down and disappears when we die.

to say his or her library has burned. When I first heard the phrase, I didn't understand it, but over time I came to realize it was perfect. Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual's consciousness is a collection of memories we've cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived. It is something that no one else can entirely share, one that burns down and disappears when we die.

In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned. When I first heard the phrase, I didn't understand it, but over time I came to realize it was perfect. Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual's consciousness is a collection of memories we've cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived.

Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual's consciousness is a collection of memories we've cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived.