#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.”

“Marvelous as may be the power of my dog to understand my moods, deathless as his affection and fidelity, his mental state is as unsolved a mystery to me as it was to my remotest ancestor.”

“It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.”

“It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist”

“All the daily routine of life, our dressing and undressing, the coming and going from our work or carrying through of its various operations, is utterly without mental reference to pleasure and pain, except under rarely realized conditions.”

“Consciousness... does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. Source of the expression 'stream of consciousness'.”

“For the moment, what we attend to is reality.”

“The self persists like a dying star, In sleep, afraid.”

“The gist of the matter is this: Every impression that comes in from without, be it a sentence which we hear, an object of vision, or an effluvium which assails our nose, no sooner enters our consciousness than it is drafted off in some determinate direction or other, making connection with the other materials already there, and finally producing what we call our reaction. The particular connections it strikes into are determined by our past experiences and the 'associations' of the present sort of impression with them.”

“To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one's being added to that being.”

“As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.”

“As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird 's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.”

“Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall.”

“As thinkers, mankind has ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final and say, The senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the idealists on the power of Thought and Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture.”

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

“The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other.”

“The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.”

“'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.”

“Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.”

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

“The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.”

“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”

“We do not yet trust the unknown power of thoughts.”

“Meaning equals emotion and emotion equals life. Choose consciously and wisely.”

“Life itself is ... a sleep within a sleep.”

“Answer me, you who believe that animals are only machines. Has nature arranged for this animal to have all the machinery of feelings only in order for it not to have any at all?”