Consciousness Quotes

I am optimistic that humanity is going to make it, that humanity is going to reach, finally, a new state of consciousness which will then create a different kind of world.

Freedom of Will-that is the expression for the complex state of delight of the person exercising volition, who commands and at the same time identifies himself with the executor of the order-who, as such, enjoys also the triumph over obstacles, but thinks within himself that it was really his own will that overcame them. In this way the person exercising volition adds the feelings of delight of his successful executive instruments, the useful underwills or under-souls-indeed, our body is but a social structure composed of many souls-to his feelings of delight as commander.

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

This is not a day for asking questions, not a day on any calendar. This day is conscious of itself. This day is a lover, bread, and gentleness, more manifest than saying can say.

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

Animals hear about death for the first time when they die.

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and considered by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being.

Nations consist of individuals. It is for every individual to bring in a different quality - the quality of awakened consciousness - into their lives.

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

Thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought

A sub-clerk in the post office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them. All experiences are indifferent in this regard. There are some that do either a service or a disservice to man. They do him a service if he is conscious. Otherwise, that has no importance: a man's failures imply judgment, not of circumstances, but of himself.

After all, what would be "beautiful" if the contradiction had not first become conscious of itself, if the ugly had not first said to itself: "I am ugly"?.

The unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it.

We are more curious about the meaning of dreams than about things we see when awake.

The longing for light is the longing for consciousness.

Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.

You are the light of the world. You are theconsciousness that illuminates the world. Know yourself as that, and that'sfreedom, liberation, awakening, the end of suffering and madness. And it'shappening right here.

You are not 'in the now;' you are the now. That is your essential identity-the only thing that never changes. Life is always now. Now is consciousness. And consciousness is who you are. That's the equation.

We [Raymond and Meursault] stared at each other without blinking, and everything came to a stop there between the sea, the sand, and the sun, and the double silence of the flute and the water. It was then that I realized that you could either shoot or not shoot.

Animals know nothing of themselves, and they also know nothing of the world.

Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life.

Those with the greatest awareness have the greatest nightmares.

Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human.

I’m ALIVE. Thinking about it, noticing it, is new. You do things and don’t watch. Then all of a sudden you look and see what you’re doing and it’s the first time, really.

The great events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of consciousness, and, when thinks of them, become unreal. Even the scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion. We reject the burden of their memory, and have anodynes against them. But the little things, the things of no moment, remain with us. In some tiny ivory cell the brain stores the most delicate, and the most fleeting impressions.

When you completely accept this moment, when you no longer argue with what is, the compulsion to think lessens and is replaced by an alert stillness. You are fully conscious, yet the mind is not labeling this moment in any way... It is a shift from identification with form --the thought or the emotion-- to being and recognizing yourself as that which has no form -- spacious awareness.

The whole life is a succession of dreams. My ambition is to be a conscious dreamer, that is all.

There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely, that a man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them. One has to pay something. A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it.

The real truths of life are never entirely new to you or to anybody because there is a level deep down within you where you already know all the things, all those spiritual truths that you read or hear, and then recognize them. I say 'recognize' because you're not... it's not new.

We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions.

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.

We only half live when we only half think.

If you are not in the state of either acceptance, enjoyment, or enthusiasm, look closely and you will find that you are creating suffering for yourself and others.

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.

When the voice of your friend or the page of your book sinks into democratic equality with the pattern of the wallpaper, the feel of your clothes, your memory of last night, and the noises from the road, you are falling asleep. The highly selective consciousness enjoyed by fully alert men, with all its builded sentiments and consecrated ideals, has as much to be called real as the drowsy chaos, and more.

The thinking mind is a useful and powerful tool, but it is also very limiting when it takes over your life completely, when you don't realize that it is only a small aspect of the consciousness that you are.

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

Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

There is a drowsy state, between sleeping and waking, when you dream more in five minutes with your eyes half open, and yourself half conscious of everything that is passing around you, than you would in five nights with your eyes fast closed, and your senses wrapt in perfect unconsciousness. At such time, a mortal knows just enough of what his mind is doing, to form some glimmering conception of its mighty powers, its bounding from earth and spurning time and space, when freed from the restraint of its corporeal associate.

Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought.

It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world color and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I can "experience" is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are . . . enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images.

Sometimes people feel mind is merely the - in some animal, the energy or something from the brain. Now there are little sort of curiosities or I think doubt sometimes a sheer sort of mental attitude, some change in our brain. So these fields, now scientists are showing some interest.

Your primary purpose is to enable consciousness to flow into what you do. The secondary purpose is whatever you want to achieve through the doing.

The theory that thought is merely a movement in the brain is, in my opinion, nonsense; for if so, that theory itself would be merely a movement, an event among atoms, which may have speed and direction but of which it would be meaningless to use the words 'true' or 'false'.

We must see that consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies which makes a nervous system possible.

There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know.

Without self awareness we are as babies in the cradles.

There is one mind common to all individual men

I have total recall. I remember being born. I remember being in the womb, I remember being inside. Coming out was great.

Associate reverently, and as much as you can, with your loftiest thoughts.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

Future success is dependent upon and inseparable from the consciousness out of which the actions emanate

LSD...reinforc ed my sense of what was important-creat ing great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.

For the moment, what we attend to is reality.

We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision and involuntary when they happen without decision. But if a decision itself were voluntary every decision would have to be preceded by a decision to decide - An infinite regression which fortunately does not occur. Oddly enough, if we had to decide to decide, we would not be free to decide

When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking. When you notice that voice, you realize that who you are is not the voice - the thinker - but the one who is aware of it.

Awareness and ego cannot coexist.

The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them.

Man struggles to find life outside himself, unaware that the life he is seeking is within him.

Conflict exists strictly as an opportunity to raise our consciousness.