Quotes about consciousness
page 14

“The Church would have liked to turn to each of those thousand unbelievers separately, to show him that he was wrong, that he had allowed himself to be led astray by his passions, that he had everything to fear in the next life, and so forth. But it was not he, really, who had become disbelieving, it was his whole class, and it was his class consciousness which replied for him when he was addressed individually.”

Bernard Groethuysen (1880–1946) French literary historian, translator and writer

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 25

Life, Fear, Passion

“…what I mean by Socialism is a condition of society in which there should be neither rich nor poor, neither master nor master's man, neither idle nor overworked, neither brainslack brain workers, nor heartsick hand workers, in a word, in which all men would be living in equality of condition, and would manage their affairs unwastefully, and with the full consciousness that harm to one would mean harm to all—the realisation at last of the meaning of the word commonwealth.”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

Why I Am A Socialist (1884).

Men

“The primary meaning of the words "modern," "modernity," with which recent times have baptised themselves, brings out very sharply that feeling of "the height of time" which I am at present analysing. "Modern" is what is "in the fashion, "that is to say, the new fashion or modification which has arisen over against the old traditional fashions used in the past. The word "modern" then expresses a consciousness of a new life, superior to the old one, and at the same time an imperative call to be at the height of one's time. For the "modern" man, not to be "modern" means to fall below the historic level.”

José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses

Chap. III: The Height Of The Times
The Revolt of the Masses (1929)

Life, Feeling, Fashion, Time

“And I am very happy to have the boat motif because, when I grew up, in summer with my parents we were always in Massachusetts, and I was always by the sea. You know, sometimes little boys love cars, but I had a particular passion for boats, and now I live by the sea. For sure, it is a passage, but it's also very fascinating for lots of things. When you get interested in something you can find out a lot about things. You might meet people who are interested in one subject or another, like they collect palms. I've found people from all over the world who were fanatical about palms, which you wouldn't know unless you were interested in palms. And the sea: because, if you've noticed, the sea is white three quarters of the time, just white – early morning. Only in the fall does it get blue, because the haze is gone. The Mediterranean [where Twombly is living later in his life], at least – the Atlantic is brown – is just always white, white, white. And then, even when the sun comes up, it becomes a lighter white... Not because I paint it white; I'd have painted it white even if it wasn't, but I am always happy that I might have. It's something that has other consciousness behind it.”

Cy Twombly (1928–2011) American painter

Source: 2000 - 2011, Cy Twombly, 2000', by David Sylvester (June 2000), pp. 174-175

Love, Life, People, World

“If I hadn't an absolute faith in the harmony of creation, I wouldn't have tried for thirty years to express it in a mathematical formula. It is only man's consciousness of what he does with his mind that elevates him above the animals, and enables him to become aware of himself and his relationship to the universe.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 61

Faith, Mathematics, Universe, Animals

“All of the women on 'The Apprentice' flirted with me - consciously or unconsciously. That's to be expected.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Ny Daily News http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/gossip/donald-cuomo-mario-fired-article-1.612165 (24 March 2004) 2000s

Women

“.. the universal cannot be expressed purely so long as the particular obstructs the path. Only when this is no longer the case can the universal consciousness (intuition, that is) which is at the origin of all art, be rendered directly, giving birth to a purified art expression.
This, however, cannot appear before its proper time. For it is the spirit of the times that determines artistic expression, which, in turn, reflects the spirit of the times. But at the present moment, that form of art alone is truly alive which expresses our present - or future - consciousness.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

1910's, Natural Reality and Abstract Reality', 1919

Art, Birth, Universe, Appearance

“Full of years, Sir Frank's body died. The diphtheria which carried him off caused him as much suffering as it would have done an ordinary man; dying was not eased by his unique gift. He slid out into the long darkness — but his consciousness continued unabated in eight other bodies.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

Let's Be Frank (1957)

Suffering

“Jivanmukti is not something to be attained after death, nor is it to be experienced or bestowed upon you in another world. It is a state of perfect awareness and equanimity, which can be experienced here and now in this world, while living in the body. Having come to experience the highest truth of oneness with the Self, such blessed souls do not have to be born again. They merge with the infinite consciousness.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

The Timeless Path (2009)

Death, Truth, World, Soul

“Take assertiveness training, get paid what you're worth, join a consciousness raising group.”

Barbara Seaman (1935–2008) American journalist

[A Dozen Who Have Risen to Prominence, The New York Times, 2007-10-15, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9802E1D6153BF931A15755C0A961958260&scp=1&sq=a+dozen+who+have+risen+to+prominence&st=nyt, 2008-02-09]
In response to the question “What do you think a woman's chief health concern should be?”

Training

“As conceived in this book, economics is the science of rational choice in a world─our world─in which resources are limited in relation to human wants. The task of economics, so defined, is to explore the implications of assuming that man is a rational maximizer of his ends in life, his satisfactions─what we shall call his “self-interest.” Rational maximization should not be confused with conscious calculation. Economics is not a thoery about consciousness. Behavior is rational when it conforms to the model of rational choice, whatever the state of mind of the chooser.(…) Nor is perfect rationality assumed; rational-choice thoery allows us to assume that rationality is “bounded” because of human cognitive limitations, although another way to think of those limitations is as costs of absorbing and using information.”

Richard A. Posner (1939) United States federal judge

Source: Economic Analysis of Law (7th ed., 2007), Ch. 1: The Nature of Economic Reasoning

Life, Books, World, Way

“"My field," said Goethe, "is time." That is indeed the absurd speech. What, in fact, is the Absurd Man? He who, without negating it, does nothing for the eternal. Not that nostalgia is foreign to him. But he prefers his courage and his reasoning. The first teaches him to live without appeal and to get along with what he has; the second informs him of his limits. Assured of his temporally limited freedom, of his revolt devoid of future, and of his mortal consciousness, he lives out his adventure within the span of his lifetime.”

Albert Camus book The Myth of Sisyphus

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Absurd Man

Courage, Nostalgia, Freedom, Time

“Not til the late nineteenth century was the doctrine of the subordination of time and change seriously challenged. Bergson and William James, animated by different motives and proceeding by different methods, then installed change at the very heart of things. Bergson took his stand on the primacy of life and consciousness, which are notoriously in a state of flux. He assimilated that which is completely real in the natural world to them, conceiving the static as that which life leaves behind as a deposit as it moves on. From this point of view he criticized mechanistic and teleological theories on the ground that both are guilty of the same error, although from opposite points. Fixed laws which govern change and fixed ends toward which changes tend are both the products of a backward look, one that ignores the forward movement of life. They apply only to that which life has produced and has then left behind in its ongoing vital creative course, a course whose behavior and outcome are unpredictable both mechanistically and from the standpoint of ends.”

John Dewey (1859–1952) American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer

Time and Individuality (1940)

Life, World, Law, Behavior

“In concentration, the consciousness is held to a single image; the whole attention of the Knower is fixed on a single point, without wavering or swerving.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

Thought Power: Its Control and Culture, 1903 http://books.google.co.in/books?id=0ePGCV4K34sC&pg=PA79, p. 79

“Which one of us has not dreamed, on ambitious days, of the miracle of a poetic prose: musical, without rhythm or rhyme; adaptable enough and discordant enough to conform to the lyrical movements of the soul, the waves of revery, the jolts of consciousness?Above all else, it is residence in the teeming cities, it is the crossroads of numberless relations that gives birth to this obsessional ideal.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Quel est celui de nous qui n'a pas, dans ses jours d'ambition, rêvé le miracle d'une prose poétique, musicale sans rythme et sans rime, assez souple et assez heurtée pour s'adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l'âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience?C'est surtout de la fréquentation des villes énormes, c'est du croisement de leurs innombrables rapports que naît cet idéal obsédant. "Dédicace, À Arsène Houssaye" http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Petits_Po%C3%A8mes_en_prose Le spleen de Paris (1862)

Dreams, Music, Soul, Birth

“Our longing to save consciousness, to give personal and human finality to the Universe and to existence, is such that even in the midst of a supreme, an agonizing and lacerating sacrifice, we should still hear the voice that assured us that if our consciousness disappears, it is that the infinite and eternal Consciousness may be enriched thereby, that our souls may serve as a nutriment to the Universal soul.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VII : Love, Suffering, Pity

Soul, Universe, Personality

“Since most professional theologians are the descendants of the advantaged class and thus often represent the consciousness of the class, it is difficult not to conclude that their theologies are in fact a bourgeois exercise in intellectual masturbation.”

James H. Cone (1938–2018) American theologian

Source: God of the Oppressed (1975, 1997), p. 43

Exercises

“It is clear that man has functioned in a multitude of states of consciousness and that different cultures have varied enormously in recognition and utilization of, and attitudes toward, ASC's. Many "primitive" peoples, for example, believe that almost every normal adult has the possibility to go into a trance state and be possessed by a god; the adult who cannot do this is a psychological cripple. How deficient Americans would seem to a person from such a culture. In many Eastern civilizations, elaborate techniques have been developed for inducing and utilizing ASC's, such as Yoga and Zen systems. In some cases vocabularies have been developed for talking about these ASC's more adequately. Fredrick Spiegelberg, the noted Indian scholar, pointed out that Sanskrit has about 20 nouns which we translate into "consciousness" or "mind" because we do not have the vocabulary to specify the different shades of meaning in these words.”

Charles Tart (1937) American spiritual writer

Foreword to Altered States of Consciousness (1969)

God, People, Personality

“The terrifying experience and obsession of death, when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous. If you talk about death, you save part of yourself. But at the same time, something of your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they have in consciousness.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

Death, Time, Parting

“The basic freedom of the world is woman's freedom. A free race cannot be born of slave mothers. A woman enchained cannot choose but give a measure of that bondage to her sons and daughters. No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.”

Margaret Sanger book Woman and the New Race

Source: Woman and the New Race, (1922), Chapter 8, "Birth Control; A Parents' Problem or Woman's?"

World, Freedom, Daughters

“The evolution of our individual consciousness paves the way toward the evolution of our collective consciousness. This individual-collective evolution, more than anything else, can and must change this world.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: You Can Change the World (2003), p. 68.

World, Way, Change

“Even the act of peeling a potato can be an artistic act if it is consciously done.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Three quotes of Joseph Beuys, in 'An interview with Joseph Beuys,', Willoughby Sharp, published in 'Artforum,' November 1969; as quoted in Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, Lucy R. Lippard, University of California Press, 1973, p. 121
1960's

“"The consciousness of the darkness in one and around one brings the longing for light. And then the light dawns; through mist and fog, perhaps, but enough to pick one's way by." He stopped a moment and then added, "and shines ever brighter unto the perfect day."”

Thomas Hughes book Tom Brown at Oxford

Source: Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), Ch. 50

Way, Light, Perfection

“The one Reality takes manifold names and forms as a result of human ignorance. It is one and the same Thing that a Bhakta calls God, a Jnani calls Brahman, a Shakta calls Shakti, an Atheist calls Nature, a Scientist calls Force or Energy, a Christian calls Father in Heaven, a Mussulman calls Allah, some others call Infinity or Truth and a Vedantin calls Atman or Self. Whatever different names there may be, the fact remains that the Thing is one and the same. The difference is only in names. The Absolute Thing, which is beyond name and form, is birthless, growthless, decayless, deathless, sexless, All-pervading, All-knowing, All-blissful, without beginning, without end, changeless, beyond time, space and causation. The One Thing or the Ocean of Consciousness by Itself is ever the same — One only without a second.”

Swami Narayanananda (1902–1988) Indian guru

Source: A Practical Guide to Samadhi (1957), p. 166

God, Truth, Nature, Reality

“We were exploring this inner realm of consciousness that we had been theorizing about all these years and suddenly we were traveling in and through and around it.”

Ram Dass book Be Here Now

Be Here Now (1971)

Travel

“I want to found a free school for creativity and interdisciplinary research in Düsseldorf [where Beuys was teaching at the Art Academy]. I hope that I will succeed. Everyone can come to me. This school has a legal status... First a school is there to develop ability, that is consciousness, then the children will recognize what a future social structure should look like; that means that one can learn a social feeling or a social sense…”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

1970's, Every Man an Artist: Talks at Documenta 5', 1972

Children, School, Hope, Art

“Only if you admit the existence of god does everything become meaningful. When we bring God into our lives, distinctions lessen and we feel that all people are our own. On the physical plane there is a difference between myself and others, but on the spiritual plane we are the same Satchidananda (Existence-Consciousness-Bliss Absolute). From that standpoint no one can help another—one is only helping oneself. The key to our philanthropy is this: In doing good to others, we try to forget the apparent distinctions between ourselves and other people. The welfare of others is my welfare—that is our attitude. Who does not want his own good? If you believe in God and serve society, you can never feel any resentment…. People may get social merit through philanthropic activities, but if their egos are involved in those activities, they will not get any spiritual merit. Even the result of a good action turns into a bondage if it is done with ego. On the other hand, unselfish actions destroys the bondage of action and bring literation to humanity.”

Swami Adbhutananda Disciple

In reply to western ladies who said that one should give higher place to philanthropy than to God.
Source: God Lived with Them, p.430

God, People, Feeling, Help

“Knowledge is not spiritual, nor is it a religion. Knowledge belongs in neither of those two categories. Knowledge says there is a consciousness inside of you, that you are complete.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles 1998
1990s

Religion, Knowledge

“The more complex the faculty of awareness or consciousness is in an organism, the more discriminations are possible to it, i. e., the more differentiating and integration between and of aspects of reality it is capable of engaging in.”

Roy A. Childs, Jr. (1949–1992) American libertarian essayist and critic

Roy A. Childs, Jr., The Epistemological Basis of Anarchism: An Open Letter to Objectivists and Libertarians,” Part I, (1969); : Republished in: Roy A. Childs, Jr. Anarchism & Justice, Libertarianism.org Press, 2012.

Reality

“The consciousness of being betrayed is to the collective consciousness of a sacred group what a certain form of schizophrenia is to the individual…it is a form of madness.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Saint Genet

(193).
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

Madness

“The belief that the conditioned derives from the unconditioned, wrong from right, represent the most fatal error and the one most fraught with consequences that is ("et la plus lourde de conséquences qui soit", Fr.) This believe gave rise (or engender) incalculable harms; it has obliterated (or obstructed or cancelled) the religious consciousness and warped the moral judgement; morevoer, it has created an abyss between science and religion, and brought generations of men to atheism.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 40.

Men, Religion, Error, Science

“Repression is an evolutionary adaptation permitting us to function under the burden of our expanded consciousness. For what we are conscious of could drive us mad.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 16

Madness

“Life passes, with us all, a day at a time; so it passed with our friend Tom, till two years were gone. Though parted from all his soul held dear, and though often yearning for what lay beyond, still was he never positively and consciously miserable; for, so well is the harp of human feeling strung, that nothing but a crash that breaks every string can wholly mar its harmony; and, on looking back to seasons which in review appear to us as those of deprivation and trial, we can remember that each hour, as it glided, brought its diversions and alleviations, so that, though not happy wholly, we were not, either, wholly miserable.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe book Uncle Tom's Cabin

Source: Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Ch. 22 "The Grass Withereth — the Flower Fadeth".

Life, Feeling, Soul, Appearance

“To say that historical conditions made personal life possible, and with it the self-consciousness that allowed psychoanalysis to emerge, is to tell half the story: one also has to consider that the erotic impulse, ever pressing for satisfaction, had something to do with making the history that encouraged its expression.”

Ellen Willis (1941–2006) writer, activist

"Historical Analysis" http://journalism.nyu.edu/faculty/files/willis-zaretsky.pdf, Dissent (Winter 2005)

Life, History, Personality

“The evolutionary urge drives man to seek for intenser forms of fulfillment, since his basic urge is for more life, more consciousness, and this contentment has an air of stagnation that the healthy mind rejects. (This recognition lies at the centre of my own 'outsider theory': that there are human beings to whom comfort means nothing, but whose happiness consists in following an obscure inner-drive, an 'appetite for reality'.)”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Tree By Tolkien (1974), p. 32

Life, Reality, Happiness

“Greece had to lose, her pure consciousness
had to make our agony only more acute.We needed God loving us in our weakness
and not in the glory of beatitude.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

"To Raja Rao" (1969) (A poem written in English)
Uncollected Poems (1954-1969)

Love, God

“Universal Consciousness in movement knows itself. But it doesn't have to know each individual for the simple reason that it sees the whole plot as one whole plot.”

Ramesh Balsekar (1917–2009) Indian guru

page 38

Universe

“Consciousness becomes a matter of philosophical debate; it's not scientifically reliable.”

Ray Kurzweil (1948) Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist

"The Singularity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

“Pity for poverty, enthusiasm for equality and freedom, recognition of social injustice and a desire to remove it, is not socialism. Condemnation of wealth and respect for poverty, such as we find in Christianity and other religions, is not socialism. The communism of early times, as it was before the existence of private property, and as it has at all times and among all peoples been the elusive dream of some enthusiasts, is not socialism. The forcible equalization advocated by the followers of Baboeuf, the so-called equalitarians, is not socialism. In all these appearances there is lacking the real foundation of capitalist society with its class antagonisms. Modern socialism is the child of capitalist society and its class antagonisms. Without these it could not be. Socialism and ethics are two separate things. This fact must be kept in mind. Whoever conceives of socialism in the sense of a sentimental philanthropic striving after human equality, with no idea of the existence of capitalist society, is no socialist in the sense of the class struggle, without which modern socialism is unthinkable. Whoever has come to a full consciousness of the nature of capitalist society and the foundation of modern socialism, knows also that a socialist movement that leaves the basis of the class struggle may be anything else, but it is not socialism.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

People, Religion, Dreams, Communication

“More than four years after the financial crisis began, the world's major advanced economies remain deeply depressed, in a scene all too reminiscent of the 1930s. And the reason is simple: we are relying on the same ideas that governed policy in the 1930s. These ideas, long since disproved, involve profound errors both about the causes of the crisis, its nature, and the appropriate response.These errors have taken deep root in public consciousness and provide the public support for the excessive austerity of current fiscal policies in many countries. So the time is ripe for a Manifesto in which mainstream economists offer the public a more evidence-based analysis of our problems.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

Paul Krugman and Richard Layard, "A Manifesto for Economic Sense" (June 27, 2012)

World, Error, Idea, Support

“We are all like fish that have separated from the sea of divine consciousness. For a person to be happy outside his or her natural relationship with God is like a fish trying to enjoy life outside of the water, on the dry sand. Holy people go to great extremes to help even one person to return his or her natural spiritual consciousness, to the sea of true joy. But the net of maya, or illusion, snatches away the minds of the masses, diverting us from the true self-interest.”

Radhanath Swami (1950) Gaudiya Vaishnava guru

?
The Journey Home: Autobiography of an American Swami (Tulsi Books, 2010)

Life, God, People, Nature

“The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods…. The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect…. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought.”

David Chalmers (1966) Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist

"Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness," 1995

Pain, Problem, Thinking, Light

“Human consciousness isn’t optimized for anything, except maybe helping feral hominids survive in the wild.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 29, “Liz: Project ATHENA” (p. 305)

Optimism, Help

“If in later life she has mastered her hunger drive by ego control, she may assume that she can control her fate herself. But that ego may in fact be very weak, because it has been built by cutting herself off from the mainstream of life through severe dieting. It is built on negative rather than positive need. In a real life crisis, such an ego may fail to operate because she does not know consciously what her own needs are. […] An ego which sets itself up against Fate is attempting to usurp the power of the Self; it swings from light to dark, from inflation to depression. Only when her ego is firmly rooted in her own feminine feeling can a woman be released from her compulsive behavior.”

Marion Woodman (1928–2018) Canadian writer

Source: The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter (1980), p. 33

Life, Hunger, Fate, Behavior

“Tiredness and fatigue are effects caused by ignorance of Nature and disobedience to her inexorable law. You may command Nature to the extent only in which you are willing to obey her. You cannot intelligently obey that which you do not comprehend. Ask of Nature that you may be one with her and she will whisper her secrets to you to the extent in which you are prepared to listen. Seek to be alone much to commune with Nature and be thus inspired by her mighty whisperings within your consciousness. Nature is a most jealous god, for she will not whisper her inspiring revelations to you unless you are absolutely alone with her.”

Walter Russell (1871–1963) American philosopher

The Man who Tapped the Secrets of the Universe

God, Secret, Law, Intelligence

“Be very careful of what you allow to infiltrate your consciousness and subconsciousness. When you watch too much television, you'll start to feel inferior from all the commercials hard selling the idea that you're not complete unless you buy their product […] The ad agencies appeal to your fear of not being wanted or loved. It's the same with the local news. They get you to stay tuned with a constant stream of fear tactics […] It's as if our culture is addicted to fear and the flat screen is our drug dealer. Don't allow that crap into your head!”

RuPaul (1960) Actriz de Televisa, dueña y señora de los ejidos cacaoahuateros

Source: Veronica Well You Better Werk! 10 Life Lessons From RuPaul In (Mostly) Gif Form http://madamenoire.com/288751/you-better-werk-10-life-lessons-from-rupaul-in-mostly-gif-form/7/, MadameNoire, 30 July 2013

Love, Fear, Feeling, Idea

“By far the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may roughly be described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects. No one, probably, who has asked himself the question, has ever doubted that personal affection and the appreciation of what is beautiful in Art or Nature, are good in themselves; nor, if we consider strictly what things are worth having purely for their own sakes, does it appear probable that any one will think that anything else has nearly so much value as the things which are included under these two heads.”

G. E. Moore book Principia Ethica

Principia Ethica (1903; revised edition, Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Pleasure, Beauty, Art, Imagination

“In fact, I would argue that these mythic modes are more easily identifiable in historiographical than they are in ‘literary’ texts. For historians usually work with much less linguistic(and therefore less poetic) self-consciousness than writers of fiction do. They tend to treat language as a transparent vehicle of representation that brings no cognitive baggage of its own into the discourse.”

Hayden White (1928–2018) American historian

"The fictions of factual representation"

“The Big Bang, the formation of stars and planets, the origin and evolution of life on this planet, the advent of human consciousness and the resultant evolution of cultures — this is the story, the one story, that has the potential to unite us, because it happens to be true.”

Ursula Goodenough book The Sacred Depths of Nature

Source: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. xv

Life, Star

“It is impossible to exercise free will as long as we are operating from within the system. Free will requires consciousness, and our pervasive and deep-seated patterns of thought are unconscious; they are outside of our awareness and therefore outside of our control. While we remain in the system, we see the world through the eyes of carnism. And as long as we look through eyes other than our own, we will be living in accordance with a truth that is not of our own choosing. We must step outside the system to find our lost empathy and make choices that reflect what we truly feel and believe, rather than what we've been taught to feel and believe.”

Melanie Joy book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows

Source: Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows (2010), p. 113

Truth, World, Feeling, Exercises

“He paused a moment and then pointed to the brook. "You see that the water divides there and flows on each side of a great rock. Now, if we imagine the brook endowed with consciousness, no doubt the stream on the right of the rock will feel itself separate from the stream on the left, but to us they are plainly continuous and the same. So I suppose every life in the world flows from the same infinite source and finally returns to it and while feeling itself separate, because limited and partial, is really continuous and the same.”

John William Lloyd (1857–1940) American anarchist, sexologist, utopian theorist and author (1857-1940)

Source: The Natural Man (1902), p. 95

Life, World, Feeling, Imagination

“In Maximus all the streams of the Greek patristic tradition flow together in synthesis. At the same time, with real originality, there is much from within that tradition that he takes to a higher level. But the course of this saint's life impressed me even more than his teaching. Once again, like Athanasius, one man was able to defend orthodox Christology against a whole empire. A Byzantine joins forces with Pope St. Martin I in Rome and finally suffers martyrdom for the true faith. This is the summit of that unity of doctrine and life which marks the whole patristic age; speculation and mysticism of the greatest subtlety are wedded to a soberly and consciously grasped martyrdom. In St. Maximus we can see in the Catholica what Kierkegaard found within the individual.”

Hans Urs Von Balthasar (1905–1988) Swedish Catholic theologian

Our Task: A Report and a Plan (1984)

Life, Age, Faith, Wedding

“I can hardly believe we are talking about a possibility so inconceivable as that other universes exist—and that the Geometers originate there!"
In this, Zh'vaern seemed to speak for the entire table.
Except for Jad. "The words fail. There is one universe, by the definition of universe. It is not the cosmos we see through our eyes and our telescopes—that is but a single Narrative, a thread winding through a Hemn space shared by many other Narratives besides ours. Each Narrative looks like a cosmos alone, to any consciousness that partakes of it. The Geometers came from other Narratives—until they came here, and joined ours."
Having dropped this bomb, Fraa Jad excused himself, and went to the toilet.
"What on earth is he going on about?" Fraa Lodoghir demanded. "It sounded like literary criticism!”

Neal Stephenson book Anathem

Part 10, "Messal"
Anathem (2008)

Universe

“In the last few decades, it has become increasingly clear that humanity is facing a crisis of unprecedented proportions. Modern science has developed effective measures that could solve most of the urgent problems in today's world--combat the majority of diseases, eliminate hunger and poverty, reduce the amount of industrial waste, and replace destructive fossil fuels by renewable sources of clean energy. The problems that stand in the way are not of economical or technological nature. The deepest sources of the global crisis lie inside the human personality and reflect the level of consciousness evolution of our species.”

Stanislav Grof (1931) Czech pychiatrist

The Cosmic Game - Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness (1997), ISBN 0-7914-3876-7, p. 219.

Hunger, Lie, World, Disease

“All societies based on slavery tend to be marked by this agonizing double consciousness: the awareness that the highest things one has to strive for are also, ultimately, wrong; but at the same time, the feeling that this is simply the nature of reality.”

David Graeber (1961) American anthropologist and anarchist

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Seven, "Honor and Degradation", p. 167

Feeling, Nature, Reality, Time

“The power of our intention and the energy it unleashes are dependent on our levels of coherence and intensity. The affirmation of our positive intentions in thought, feeling and action increases the power of our abilities. Nonetheless, it is important to appreciate that the matrix of physical, emotional, and mental levels of consciousness through which our personal and collective intentions and choices are explored and experienced require a “health warning” on interpreting the Law of Attraction too simplistically.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Cosmos: A Co-creator's Guide to the Whole-World (2010), p. 119.

Health, Law, Feeling, Dependency

“Daisy was a consciously happy young woman without any of the usual endowments that make for conscious happiness, money apart. She was not pretty, she was not clever, she had no friends, no talents, nor even an imagination to make her think she was happy when she was really miserable. As she was never miserable, she had no need of an imagination.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

"Daisy and Venison" from Progress of Stories (Deya, Majorca: Seizin Press; London, Constable, 1935)

Money, Imagination, Thinking, Happiness

“Life has no 'isms' in it, Supermind also has no 'isms'. It is the mind that introduces all 'isms' and creates confusion. That is the difference between a man who lives and a thinker who can't: a leader who thinks too much and is busy with ideas, trying all the time to fit the realities of life to his ideas, hardly succeeds, while the leader who is destined to succeed does not bother his head about ideas. He sees the forces at work and knows by intuition those that make for success. He also knows the right combination of forces and the right moment when he should act…. At one time it was thought that the mind could grasp the whole Truth and solve all the problems that face humanity. The mind had its full play and we find that it is not able to solve the problems. Now, we find that it is possible to go beyond mind and there is the Supermind which is the organization of the Infinite Consciousness. There you find the truth of all that is in mind and life…. For instance, you find that Democracy, Socialism and Communism have each some truth behind it, but it is not the whole Truth. What you have to do is to find out the forces that are at work and understand what it is of which all these mental ideas and 'isms' are a mere indication. You have to know the mistakes which people commit in dealing with the truth of these forces and the truth that is behind the mistakes also. I am, at present, speaking against democracy; that does not mean that there is no truth behind it. I know the truth [behind democracy], but I speak against democracy because that mentality is at present against the Truth that is trying to come down.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

May 18, 1926
India's Rebirth

Life, People, Truth, Democracy

“Death is a stage in human progress, to be passed as we would pass from childhood to youth, or from youth to manhood, and with the same consciousness of an everlasting nature.”

Edmund Sears (1810–1876) American minister

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 177.

Death, Youth, Nature, Childhood

“Of all the wondrous elements in our vast and complex universe, there is perhaps nothing more intriguing, than consciousness.”

Varadaraja V. Raman (1932) American physicist

page 182
Truth and Tension in Science and Religion

Universe

“Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) French phenomenological philosopher

Signs, trans. R. McCleary (Evanston: 1964), p. 203

Understanding

“Suppose a surface to be part red and part blue; so that every point on it is either red or blue, and of course, no part can be both red and blue. What then, is the color of the surface in the immediate neighborhood of the point. …it follows that the boundary is half red and half blue. In like manner, we find it necessary to hold that consciousness essentially occupies time… Thus, the present is half past and half time to come. …Take another case: the velocity of a particle at any instant of time is its mean velocity during an infinitesimal instant in which that time is consumed. Just so, my immediate feeling is my feeling through an infinitesimal duration containing the present instant.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

The Law of Mind (1892)

Color, Feeling, Time, Past

“However rich we may become in knowledge of the deeper causes of historical results, we forgo all understanding of history if we forget this inner continuity,--i. e., the conscious intentions of the participants in history-making and their consciously known successes.”

William Ernest Hocking (1873–1966) American philosopher

Source: The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912), Ch. V : Religion's Dilemma in Respect to Theory, p. 58.

History, Understanding, Knowledge, Success

“What has been shown by Machiavelli, who is often (like Nietzsche) congratulated for tearing off hypocritical masks, brutally revealing the truth, and so on, is not that men profess one thing and do another (although no doubt he shows this too) but that when they assume that the two ideals are compatible, or perhaps are even one and the same ideal, and do not allow this assumption to be questioned, they are guilty of bad faith (as the existentialists call it, or of “false consciousness,” to use a Marxist formula) which their actual behavior exhibits. Machiavelli calls the bluff not just of official morality—the hypocrisies of ordinary life—but of one of the foundations of the central Western philosophical tradition, the belief in the ultimate compatibility of all genuine values. His own withers are unwrung. He has made his choice. He seems wholly unworried by, indeed scarcely aware of, parting company with traditional Western morality.”

Isaiah Berlin book Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas

Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (1980), The Originality of Machiavelli (1971)

Life, Men, Truth, Faith

“… what I’ve tried to allow is for the essay to be a space in which the consciousness which reads poetry or remembers a line of poetry or listens to music or goes for a walk, is also the consciousness that is inflected and threatened and endangered by the political; is also the consciousness that registers and is permeated by the political. That somehow it is not a separate … consciousness that is hiding behind the facade of the man who remembers a line of poetry or forgets it, but that it is the same consciousness in which these various things are coming in and going out.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Small Orange Flags (2003)

Music, Reading, Forgetting

“Through the prevailing social consciousness, social relations give shape to the individual who is born and educated in a specific society. In this sense, social relations create the individual.”

Adam Schaff (1913–2006) Polish Marxist philosopher and theorist

Adam Schaff (1970:66), as cited in: John F Schostak (2012), Maladjusted Schooling (RLE Edu L). p. 25

Education, Sense

“By a Gestalt quality we understand a positive content of presentation bound up in consciousness with the presence of complexes of mutually separable (i. e., independently presentable) elements. That complex of presentations which is necessary for the existence of a given Gestalt quality we call the foundation [Grundlage] of that quality.”

Christian von Ehrenfels (1859–1932) Austrian philosopher

Source: "On Gestalt Qualities," 1890, p. 93

Understanding

“When factory farmers tell us that animals kept in 'intensive' (i. e. concentration) camps are being kindly spared the inclemency of a winter outdoors, and that calves do not mind being tethered for life on slats because they have never known anything else, an echo should start in our historical consciousness: do you remember how the childlike blackamoors were kindly spared the harsh responsibilities of freedom, how the skivvy didn't feel the hardship of scrubbing all day because she was used to it, how the poor didn't mind their slums because they had never known anything else?”

Brigid Brophy (1929–1995) novelist, essayist

Source: The Rights of Animals (1965), p. 17

Life, Feeling, Freedom, Winter

“[W]e still depend on crisis as the midwife of change, and we must learn to arrange things so that we may depend on it less. Yes, but the particular forms of the advance always remain obscure and controversial. We cannot even agree whether they should occur chiefly at the subnational, national, or supranational levels; whether the ideas that animate them should appear as local heresies—or as a universalizing heresy—doctrines, as liberalism and socialism were in their day that convey a message to all humanity; and how we should understand and practice the relation between change of institutions and changes of consciousness. Because the forms of change are obscure and controversial, they will continue to give rise to conflict and even to war. They will be dangerous. Yes, but all of this will take place, or fail to take place, in the long time of history, not in the short time of biography. We cannot wait; we must find a solution for ourselves nowː a way of foreshadowing in life as we can now live it that which the species has yet collectively failed to achieve.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 143-4

Life, War, Way, History

“Such abstruse ideas are totally alien to Chopin. The Romantic interweaving of music and literature that was characteristic of Schumann and Liszt was a negligible source of inspiration. Schumann dedicated Kreisleriana to Chopin, but in fact Chopin’s consciousness for classical strength and form had nothing in common with the exalted, torn, eccentric and confused character of the work.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

Music, Literature, Idea

“Mental states of every kind — sensations, feelings, images— which were at one time present in consciousness and then have disappeared from it — have not with their disappearance absolutely ceased to exist. Although the inwardly - turned look may no longer be able to find them, nevertheless they have not been utterly destroyed and annulled, but in a certain manner they, continue to exist, stored up to speak, in the memory.”

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909) German psychologist

Source: Memory: A contribution to experimental psychology, 1885, p. 1; Cited in: Richard F. Thompson, Stephen A. Madigan (2013) Memory: The Key to Consciousness, p. 87

Feeling, Memory, Time

“SHALMANESER That real cool piece of hardware up at the GT tower. They say he's apt to evolve to true consciousness one day. Also they say he's as intelligent as a thousand of us put together, which isn't really saying much, because when you put a thousand of us together look how stupidly we behave.”

John Brunner book Stand on Zanzibar

tracking with closeups (17) "Brighter Than A Thousand Men"
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

Intelligence

“Mind and matter brought down to the essential, to the consciousness and its object, form a natural whole, and the difficulty does not consist in uniting but in separating them.”

Alfred Binet (1857–1911) French psychologist and inventor of the first usable intelligence test

Source: The Mind and the Brain, 1907, p. 184

Nature

“At present we are living through an unusual period in time a new cosmic creation has become reality in the world, a creativity within ourselves which pervades our consciousness.... in this way the artist became the foundation on which progress in the reconstruction of life could advance beyond the frontiers of the all-seeing eye and the all-hearing ear. Thus a picture was no longer an anecdote nor a lyric poem nor a lecture on morality nor a feast for the eye but a sign and symbol of this new conception of the world which comes from within us.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

1915 - 1925, Suprematism' in World Reconstruction (1920)

Life, World, Way, Reality

“When the individual says he has a valid title to life, he means that all that is he, is his own; his body, his mind, his faculties. Maybe there is something else to life, such as a soul, but without going into that realm, he is willing to settle on what he knows about himself—his consciousness.”

Frank Chodorov (1887–1966) American libertarian thinker

Source: The Income Tax: Root of All Evil (1954), p. 12

Life, Soul

“It is commonly thought that everything that is can be put into words. But there is a wide range of emotional response that we make that cannot be put into words. We are so used to making these emotional responses that we are not consciously aware of them till they are represented in art work.”

Agnes Martin (1912–2004) American artist

In 'Beauty Is the Mystery of Life', 1989; a lecture by Agnes Martin, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 1989. Printed in Agnes Martin, eds. Morris and Bell, pp. 158–59
1980 - 2000

Art

“In the most advanced areas of this civilization, the social controls have been introjected to the point where even individual protest is affected at its roots. The intellectual and emotional refusal “to go along” appears neurotic and impotent. This is the socio-psychological aspect of the political event that marks the contemporary period: the passing of the historical forces which, at the preceding stage of industrial society, seemed to represent the possibility of new forms of existence. But the term “introjection” perhaps no longer describes the way in which the individual by himself reproduces and perpetuates the external controls exercised by his society. Introjection suggests a variety of relatively spontaneous processes by which a Self (Ego) transposes the “outer” into the “inner.” Thus introjection implies the existence of an inner dimension distinguished from and even antagonistic to the external exigencies—an individual consciousness and an individual unconscious apart from public opinion and behavior. The idea of “inner freedom” here has its reality: it designates the private space in which man may become and remain “himself.” Today this private space has been invaded and whittled down by technological reality. Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual, and industrial psychology has long since ceased to be confined to the factory. The manifold processes of introjection seem to be ossified in almost mechanical reactions. The result is, not adjustment but mimesis: an immediate identification of the individual with his society and, through it, with the society as a whole. This immediate, automatic identification (which may have been characteristic of primitive forms of association) reappears in high industrial civilization; its new “immediacy,” however, is the product of a sophisticated, scientific management and organization. In this process, the “inner” dimension of the mind in which opposition to the status quo can take root is whittled down. The loss of this dimension, in which the power of negative thinking—the critical power of Reason—is at home, is the ideological counterpart to the very material process in which advanced industrial society silences and reconciles the opposition. The impact of progress turns Reason into submission to the facts of life, and to the dynamic capability of producing more and bigger facts of the same sort of life. The efficiency of the system blunts the individuals' recognition that it contains no facts which do not communicate the repressive power of the whole. If the individuals find themselves in the things which shape their life, they do so, not by giving, but by accepting the law of things—not the law of physics but the law of their society.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 9-11

Life, Law, Way, Behavior

“In the stupendous rush of change which is coming on the human world as a result of the present tornado of upheaval, ancient India's culture, attacked by European modernism, overpowered in the material field, betrayed by the indifference of her children, may perish for ever along with the soul of the nation that holds it in its keeping…. Each nation is a Shakti or power of the evolving spirit in humanity and lives by the principle which it embodies. India is the Bharata Shakti, the living energy of a great spiritual conception, and fidelity to it is the very principle of her existence…. To follow a law or principle involuntarily or ignorantly or contrary to the truth of one's consciousness is a falsehood and a self-destruction. To allow oneself to be killed, like the lamb attacked by the wolf, brings no growth, farthers no development, assures no spiritual merit. Concert or unity may come in good time, but it must be an underlying unity with a free differentiation, not a swallowing up of one by another or an incongruous and inharmonious mixture. Nor can it come before the world is ready for these greater things. To lay down one's arms in a state of war is to invite destruction and it can serve no compensating spiritual purpose…. India is indeed awaking and defending herself, but not sufficiently and not with the whole-heartedness, the clear sight and the firm resolution which can alone save her from the peril. Today it is close; let her choose,… for the choice is imperatively before her, to live or to perish.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

December, 1918
India's Rebirth

War, Children, Truth, World

“Any high school boy or girl knows how to calculate the force with which a stone he or she throws will hit someone in the face, but nothing in those equations they use will tell them whether or not to throw it…To solve the problem of values we must know what is valuable. Consciousness is the most valuable commodity…To bring values into science, we need to connect science with what is valuable—consciousness.”

Ravi Gomatam (1950) Indian academic

An interview with Ravi Gomatam by Thomas Beardy for Clarion Call magazine (Clarion University's newspaper) There Consciousness Within Science?" http://www.vedicsciences.net/articles/consciousness-in-science.html#Consciousness-Science"Is, 1990.

School, Girl, Boy, Problem

“I believe that painter's judgments of painting are first ethical, then aesthetic, the aesthetic judgments flowing from an ethical context. Doubtless no painter systematically thinks this way; but it does seem to me to be basically what happens when modern painters judge any new manifestations of painting... An artist's 'art' is just his consciousness, developed slowly and painstakingly with many mistakes en route. How dare they collect those ugly early Van Gogh's like trophies…”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

Source: 1950s, The painter and the audience' (1954), pp. 109-110

Art, Way, Thinking, Painting

“You often say to yourself in the course of your life that you ought to avoid having too much business, 'polypragmosyne' [incessant activity], and, more especially, that the older you get, the more you ought to avoid entering on new business. But it's all very well saying this, and giving yourself andothers good advice. The very fact of growing older means taking up a new business; all our circumstances change, and we must either stop doing anything at all or else willing and consciously take on the new role we have to play on life’s stage.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Maxim 259, trans. Stopp
Maxims and Reflections (1833)

Life, Business, Change

“A dim consciousness of infinite mystery and grandeur lies beneath all the commonplace of life. There is an awfulness and a majesty around us, in all our little worldliness.”

Albert Pike book Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. XXII : Grand Master Architect, p. 190

Life

“It need hardly be said that the social philosophy of the time did not remain unaffected by the political evolution and the industrial development. Slowly sinking into men's minds all this while was the conception of a new social nexus, and a new end of social life. It was discovered (or rediscovered) that a society is something more than an aggregate of so many individual units—that it possesses existence distinguishable from those of any of its components. A perfect city became recognized as something more than any number of good citizens—something to be tried by other tests, and weighed in other balances than the individual man. The community must necessarily aim, consciously or not, at its continuance as a community: its life transcends that of any of its members; and the interests of the individual unit must often clash with those of the whole.”

Sidney Webb, 1st Baron Passfield (1859–1947) British Baron and politician

Fabian Essays in Socialism &ndash; The Basis of Socialism &ndash; Historic http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Shaw/shwFS1.html#The%20Basis%20of%20Socialism,%20Historic,%20by%20Sidney%20Webb, The New Synthesis, I.1.47. Edited by George Bernard Shaw (1889)

Life, Men, Communication, Time

“What fascinates me about Van Gogh is that his sun dries up everything. Maybe he was melodramatic but my point really is.... if you are a painter you have to face that self-consciousness. You get dirty and pathetic; very miserable. It makes me self-conscious to talk about it. There is something corrupt on art. Nothing do with any 'ism' but a thing in nature loses its innocence and becomes a grotesque thing.... maybe this difficulty is personal with me, and maybe it is something that other painters have in common. Perhaps it is also something of today.”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

in conversation with W.C. Seitz
Quote from Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 121.
1980's

Art, Nature, Sun, Personality

“You spend months and months listening to the music, absorbing, practicing, working with real musicians who worked with them and getting as much of that as you can. And then the day you start shooting, you have to throw it all away. Because, they had no self-consciousness. They were natural performers and at that time, it wasn't about how you could synthesize a voice and make it appealing, it was about the natural little hiccups and the way you related a story or wrote the soul in the words you wrote. And 90% of your popularity was your performance and your interpretation of your own song. So, once we learned it all you just have to just kind of hope it all sunk in somewhere and just let it all go, cause they just had incredible confidence.”

Reese Witherspoon (1976) American film actress and producer

On making Walk the Line IGN Interview with Reese Witherspoon http://movies.ign.com/articles/666/666865p1.html (November 15, 2005).

Hope, Music, Way, Soul

“To find themselves utterly alone at night where company is desirable and expected makes some people fearful; but a case more trying by far to the nerves is to discover some mysterious companionship when intuition, sensation, memory, analogy, testimony, probability, induction — every kind of evidence in the logician's list — have united to persuade consciousness that it is quite in isolation.”

Thomas Hardy book Far from the Madding Crowd

Source: Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Ch. 2

People, Fear, Memory, Night

“The process which has led us to this result, and which might justifiably be called a Critique of all Scepticism, yields also the final impossibility of materialism in a still clearer way than we noticed before. We saw, some distance back, that the actual of sense could by no possibility be the source of consciousness, being, on the contrary, its mere phenomenon — its mere externalised presentation (picture-object) originated from within. But the hypothetical potential of sense, the assumed subsensible substance called matter, we have now seen to be precisely that self-contradiction talked of as the physical thing-in-itself, and it therefore disappears from the real universe along with that illusion. We have, then, a definitive Critique of all Materialism.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Later German Philosophy, p.170-1

Way, Sense, Universe

“A later generation could have explained the miracle to Sir Frank — though explaining in terms he would not have understood. Though he knew well enough the theory of family traits and likenesses, it would have been impossible then to make him comprehend the intricacy of a chromosome which carries inside it — not merely the stereotypes of parental hair or temperament — but the secret knowledge of how to breathe, how to work the muscles to move the bones, how to grow, how to remember, how to commence the processes of thought … all the infinite number of secret "how to's" that have to be passed on for life to stay above jelly level.
A freak chromosome in Sir Frank ensured he passed on, together with these usual secrets, the secret of his individual consciousness.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

Let's Be Frank (1957)

Life, Secret, Family, Knowledge

“No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.”

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) American poet, essayist and feminist

Blood, Bread and Poetry (1986), ch. 1

“The moral improvement demands an evolution leading to a higher consciousness”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 60 - Hélène's Claparède-Spir underlined.

“The real problem of living creatures is that for most of the time they are not aware that they are an active force. They become aware of it briefly -- as the lion tracks its prey, as the warrior gallops into battle -- but, for the most part, they feel as helpless as leaves carried on the wind. When we look back at our struggles, we often become aware of how much we have achieved. Meanwhile, as we plod along in the present moment, trying to anticipate the next problem, life seems a long uphill grind. Yet man has always had these moments in which he sees that things are not as bad as they appear -- those moments of exaltation or deep relaxation, when he suddenly becomes aware of the powers of his own mind. It is in these moments that he suddenly grasps the basic nature of his problem: that he is stifled and blinded by "close-upness" -- by the sheer pressure of the world against his senses. The moments of insight permit him a bird's-eye view of his own life, and make him aware that his everyday consciousness amounts to a worm's-eye view.”

Colin Wilson book The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders

Source: The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders (1988), p. 248

Life, World, Feeling, Nature

“The essential elements of giving are power and love — activity and affection — and the consciousness of the race testifies that in the high and appropriate exercise of these is a blessedness greater than any other.”

Mark Hopkins (educator) (1802–1887) American educationalist and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 5.

Love, Exercises

“I desire that after I have given the judgment of the Court, that judgment may not be talked about; I have given it upon my oath, and am answerable to my country for it. I have been before reminded that these things are not passing in a corner, but in the open face of the world; I hope I need not be admonished that I am to administer justice; if I have done amiss, let the wrath and indignation of Parliament be brought out against me; let me be impeached; I am ready to meet the storm whenever it comes, having at least one protection; the consciousness that I am right. In protecting the dignity of the Court, I do the best thing I can do for the public: for if my conduct here is extra-judicially arraigned, the administration of justice is arraigned and affronted, and that no man living shall do with impunity.”

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon (1732–1802) British Baron

Proceedings against the Dean of St. Asaph (1783), 21 How. St. Tr. 875.

World, Justice, Hope, Country

“From negative capability, embodied in institutions, practices, and modes of consciousness, a wealth of practical competitive advantages result. However, negative capability is not merely a source of such advantages; it is a direct manifestation of our godlike power to outreach the established settings of action and thought and to split the difference between being inside a framework and being outside it. History, we may suppose, selects for this advantage more powerfully and above all more quickly than any form of natural competition for reproductive success, at the level of the species, the organism, or the genotype, can exert selective influence. Negative capability is power to the mind in its least modular and computable aspectsː mind-making continued through politics.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 134

History, Nature, Success, Wealth

“There is nothing wrong in the idea of a body, nor even in the idea ‘I am the body.’ But limiting oneself to one body only is a mistake. In reality all existence, every form, is my own, within my consciousness. (…).”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Body
Source: I am That, P.136.

Idea, Reality

“You must have your own responsibility, your own consciousness.”

Philippe Starck (1949) French architect and industrial designer

Starck (2007) "Starck speaks: Politics, Pleasure and Play" in: The New Architectural Pragmatism William S. Saunders ed. p. 36

“In fine, a condition of our making freedom possible in a world ordered by the rigour of natural law is that we accept an idealistic philosophy of Nature: the laws of Nature must issue from the free actor himself, and upon a world consisting of states in his own consciousness, a world in so far of his own making.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.325

World, Law, Nature, Freedom

“God is not running the world. (…) All happens by itself. You are asking the question and you are supplying the answer. And you know the answer when you ask the question. All is play in consciousness. All divisions are illusory. (…)”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

God
Source: "I am That." P.36.

God, World, Question