Consciousness Quotes

“There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same.”

“It sometimes occurs that memory has a personality of its own and volunteers or refuses its information at its will, not at mine.”

“Thought dissolves the material universe by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic.”

“Time is indeed the theater and seat of illusions; nothing is so ductile and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century, and dwarfs an age to an hour.”

“The mind is a finer body, and resumes its functions of feeding, digesting, absorbing, excluding, and generating, in a new and ethereal element. Here, in the brain, is all the process of alimentation repeated, in the acquiring, comparing, digesting, and assimilating of experience. Here again is the mystery of generation repeated.”

“With most men, scarce a link of memory holds yesterday and to-day together.”

“There is one mind common to all individual men”

“Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?”

“The day is conscious of itself.”

“Our thoughts are a field of energy cycles, a mind field, and just by our thoughts alone we impact not only ourselves but those around us as well.”

“I think and that is all that I am.”

“In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present.”

“Out of sleeping a waking, Out of waking a sleep.”

“The difference between highly functioning people and people who live with ordinary levels of consciousness is that the self-actualizers never put their intention on what they don't want. They know that what you think about is what expands.”

“In fact, everything that emanates from source emanates from a source of well-being. When we take on this ego consciousness, when we take on hate rather than love in our hearts, we create all of this divisiveness, and we create all of the problems, the struggles, the difficulties, the diseases, the poverty.”

“However inadequate our ideas of causal efficacy may be, we are less wide of the mark when we say that our ideas and feelings have it, than the Automatists are when they say they haven't it. As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of metaphysical criticism all causes are obscure. But one has no right to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject only . . . whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had never been born.”

“If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take us as long to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking. All recollected times undergo, accordingly, what M. Ribot calls foreshortening; and this foreshortening is due to the omission of an enormous number of facts which filled them.”

“Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.”

“Creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hello! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind.”

“I believe... that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.”

“I have observed dreams and visions very carefully, and am now certain that the imagination has some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not, and that its commandments, delivered when the body is still and the reason silent, are the most binding we can ever know.”

“Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits. He possesses power of various sorts which he habitually fails to use.”

“The mind is made up by what it feeds upon.”

“The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the 'pure' experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet.”

“There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life.”