Quotes about consciousness
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“All forms of art are consciousness expanders, and I am convinced that they will take us further, and more consciously, than drugs.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Section 4.14
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)

Art

“It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained;… the individual who has not staked his or her life may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he or she has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) German philosopher

Source: Phenomenology of Spirit

Life, Truth, Freedom, Personality

“There must exist a paradigm, a practical model for social change that includes an understanding of ways to transform consciousness that are linked to efforts to transform structures.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Source: Killing Rage: Ending Racism

Way, Understanding, Effort, Change

“There is nothing wrong withmistakes, but one should always makeones. mistakes is a hallmark of dim consciousness.”

Dave Sim (1956) Canadian cartoonist, creator of Cerebus

“Hunches [are] just messages from the subconscious, which [is] thinking furiously all the time and processing information we have not consciously noted.”

Dean Koontz book Intensity

Source: Intensity

Thinking, Time

“Working on our own consciousness is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being love is a supreme creative act.”

Ram Dass (1931–2019) American contemporary spiritual teacher and the author of the 1971 book Be Here Now

Love

“If you put yourself in a position where you have to stretch outside your comfort zone, then you are forced to expand your consciousness.”

Les Brown (1945) American politician

“He was in a terrible state- that of consciousness.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

“Knowledge exists in two forms - lifeless, stored in books, and alive, in the consciousness of men. The second form of existence is after all the essential one; the first, indispensable as it may be, occupies only an inferior position.”

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

Men, Books, Knowledge

“When we are being compassionate, we consider another's circumstance with love rather than judgement… To be compassionate is to move into the right here, right now with an open heart consciousness and a willingness to be supportive.”

Jill Bolte Taylor (1959) American neuroscientist

Source: My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey

Love, Support, Heart

“(memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.”

Julio Cortázar book Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

Source: Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

Memory

“We demand that sex speak the truth […] and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves wich we think we possess in our immediate consciousness.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Source: The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction

Truth, Sex, Thinking

“Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.”

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (1881–1955) French philosopher and Jesuit priest

Love

“It’s hard to kill a creature once it lets you see its consciousness.”

Carl Sagan book Contact

Source: Contact (1985), Chapter 9 (p. 147)

“We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

53 min 54 sec
Source: We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to selfawareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.
Context: And we who embody the local eyes and ears and thoughts and feelings of the cosmos we've begun, at last, to wonder about our origins. Star stuff, contemplating the stars organized collections of 10 billion-billion-billion atoms contemplating the evolution of matter tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet Earth and perhaps, throughout the cosmos.

Star

“The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness. Of these, only three involve misery or suffering. Most of us spend our time moving back and forth between these three.”

Jenny Offill book Dept. of Speculation

Source: Dept. of Speculation

Suffering, Time

“Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complex that it must include a model of itself.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene

World

“Who can live with this Consciousness and not wake frightened at sunrise?”

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) American poet

Source: The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965-1971

“Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated.”

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

"My Credo", a speech to the German League of Human Rights, Berlin (Autumn 1932), as published in Einstein: A Life in Science (1994) by Michael White and John Gribbin, p. 262.
1930s

Life, Truth, Justice, Beauty

“Modern mass culture, aimed at the "consumer", the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.”

Andrei Tarkovsky book Sculpting in Time

Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 42

People, Soul, Question

“We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.”

Anna Quindlen (1952) journalist, Novelist

Source: How Reading Changed My Life

Life, Dreams, Reading

“It seems that what I really want is a drug that will increase my consciousness of others, not myself.”

Jerzy Kosiński book The Painted Bird

Source: The Painted Bird

“Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.”

Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) Austrian physicist

“There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe.”

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (1881–1955) French philosopher and Jesuit priest

Friendship

“Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.”

Thomas Ligotti (1953) American horror author

Source: The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

People, Learning

“Stripping the protection wards off the ship was bad enough—it's a strong, strong enchantment, demon-based—but when you fell, I had to put a fast spell on the truck so it wouldn't sink when I lost consciousness. And I will lose consciousness, Alec.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Source: City of Ashes

Strong

“Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.”

Gary Shteyngart (1972) american journalist and writer

Reading

“Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.”

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist

Knowledge

“When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Thinking

“But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.”

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) writer and activist

Women, Sleep

“Man lives consciously for himself, but serves as an unconscious instrument for the achievement of historical, universally human goals.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Source: War and Peace

Universe

“Every test successfully met is rewarded by some growth in intuitive knowledge, strengthening of character, or initiation into a higher consciousness.”

Paul Brunton (1898–1981) British philosopher

Source: The Notebooks of Paul Brunton

Knowledge

“I don’t mean to make a big deal out of sobriety, by the way. Of all the modes of human consciousness available to the modern consumer I consider it to be the most overrated.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Source: Wonder Boys

Way

“The best musicians transpose consciousness into sound; painters do the same for color and shape.”

Haruki Murakami book Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Source: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Color

“CALVIN:
Our hero regains consciousness at the feet of a sarcastic alien.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

“You have deep-seated survival anxieties. And you don't like bigots, bullies, snobs or hypocrites. Subconsciously there are many people you hate."

"Consciously, sir, consciously," Yossarian corrected in an effort to help. "I hate them consciously.”

Joseph Heller book Catch-22

Source: Catch-22

Hate, People, Effort, Help

“Self-consciousness, that's what it is. Always my abiding vice. I keep seeing myself. Me watching myself watching others watch me. How do you lose that? What's the trick?”

Stephen Fry book Making History

Source: Making History

“Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.”

Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …

Nature

“I know," he said, looking down at himself self-consciously. "I am not-I mean, I look-"
"Beautiful," she said, and she meant it. "You look beautiful, James Carstairs.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Source: Clockwork Prince

Beauty

“Will smirked, clearly pleased at the effect he was having. "I've no idea. I lost consciousness about then. I was having a lovely dream about a young woman who had mislaid all her clothes…”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Love, Dreams, Idea, Clothes

“Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Art, Painting

“There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

“Just let go. Let go of how you thought your life should be, and embrace the life that is trying to work its way into your consciousness.”

Caroline Myss (1952) author from the United States

Life, Way

“Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness.”

Haruki Murakami book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Source: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

World, Beauty, Personality

“Meditate. Breathe consciously. Listen. Pay attention. Treasure every moment. Make the connection.”

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

“The full cosmos consists of the physical stuffconsciousness. Take away consciousness and it's only dust; add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time.”

Neal Stephenson book Anathem

Source: Anathem

Idea, Time

“Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.”

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer

Life, Books, Time

“All normal life, Peter, consciously or otherwise, resent domination. If the domination is by an inferior, or by a supposed inferior, the resentment becomes stronger.”

Isaac Asimov book I, Robot

Source: I, Robot

Life

“And that is how we are. By strength of will we cut off our inner intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness. This causes a state of dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse when it does fall.”

D.H. Lawrence book Lady Chatterley's Lover

Source: Lady Chatterley's Lover

Knowledge, Time

“Self-consciousness kills communication.”

Rick Steves (1955) US travel writer

Communication

“Her voice was like a line from an old black-and-white Jean-Luc Godard movie, filtering in just beyond the frame of my consciousness.”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

“Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.”

Aldous Huxley book The Art of Seeing

Source: The Art of Seeing

Deep, Change

“Our great human adventure is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain.”

Tom Robbins book Wild Ducks Flying Backward

Source: Wild Ducks Flying Backward

Life, Soul, Light

“Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.”

Raymond Chandler book The Big Sleep

Source: The Big Sleep

“The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it Intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don't know how or why.”

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

“Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.”

Haruki Murakami book 1Q84

Source: 1Q84

“When I replied that I loved her too in that way, I was the liar, not she, for I never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

Love, Way, Time

“Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

The Believer interview (2013)
Context: Yeah, our view of reality, the one we conventionally take, is one among many. It’s pretty much a fact that our entire universe is a mental construct. We don’t actually deal with reality directly. We simply compose a picture of reality from what’s going on in our retinas, in the timpani of our ears, and in our nerve endings. We perceive our own perception, and that perception is to us the entirety of the universe. I believe magic is, on one level, the willful attempt to alter those perceptions. Using your metaphor of an aperture, you would be widening that window or changing the angle consciously, and seeing what new vistas it affords you.

Universe

“Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's value.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Happy, Happiness

“My thoughts went round and round and it occurred to me that if I ever wrote a novel it would be of the 'stream of consciousness' type and deal with an hour in the life of a woman at the sink.”

Barbara Pym book Excellent Women

Source: Excellent Women

Life

“The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you'll do yourself a service.”

Stephen Sondheim (1930) American composer and lyricist

“Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one’s consciousness can permit the faking of existence.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Source: The Journals of Ayn Rand

“I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life but that great consciousness of life.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

Journal entry (November 1951) as published in the Kerouac ROMnibus http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ctitext2/resguide/resources/j100.html

Life, Hope

“We never do anything consciously for the last time without sadness of heart.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Sadness, Time, Heart

“He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become.”

David Malouf book An Imaginary Life

Source: An Imaginary Life

Pain

“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

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

Problem

“We can not fight for our rights and our history as well as future until we are armed with weapons of criticism and dedicated consciousness.”

Edward Said (1935–2003) Professor of English and literature

History, Future, Fight

“If your social consciousness seems stuck in 1975, 2014 is gonna be a rough ride.”

John Scalzi (1969) American science fiction writer

“Consciousness, unprovable by scientific standards, is forever, then, the impossible phantom in the predictable biologic machine, and your every thought a genuine supernatural event. Your every thought is a ghost, dancing.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

Source: Promethea, Vol. 5

Dance

“The future is up for grabs. It belongs to any and all who will take the risk and accept the responsibility of consciously creating the future they want.”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

Future

“Resist the temptation to think what afflicts you is peculiar to you. Have faith that what is in your consciousness can be communicated to the consciousness of all. And is, in many cases, already there.”

Alice Walker book The Temple of My Familiar

Source: The Temple of My Familiar

Faith, Communication, Thinking, Affliction

“The solution to the problem of the day is the awakening of the consciousness of humanity to the divinity within.”

Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882–1927) Indian Sufi

Problem

“To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness.”

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) American poet

Forgetting

“If you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool and solid lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto.”

Charlotte Brontë book Shirley

Source: Shirley (1849), Ch. 1: Levitical

Thinking, Passion

“Women must not merely imitate men. Women have more to give than performing any job in society like neutered robots. Those who talk today of rousing the 'consciousness' of women contribute an idea of real importance. It was such a grievous mistake to leave out women. For whence can come love, compassion and understanding if not out of the relations of men and women and of them to their children?”

Dora Russell (1894–1986) author, feminist, socialist campaigner

Source: The Tamarisk Tree (1975), Ch. XIV

Love, Women, Men, Children

“If the study of history is the study of language in one form or another, and if we really fabricate our past, not merely—weakly—live it; then we can begin to see how the world was Greek once, or was Roman, since every page of consciousness was written in these tongues then. All the central documents—laws, plays, poems, reports, abiding wisdoms, letters, scientific learning, news—were couched in Greek or Latin phrases, and the chief historians consulted them, composed their chronicles from the same speech, in the same words. Don't you see that when a man writes the history of your country in another mother-language, he is bent on conquest?”

William H. Gass book The Tunnel

Source: The Tunnel (1995), p. 271

Wisdom, World, Law, History

“At this point bourgeois thought must come up against an insuperable obstacle, for its starting-point and its goal are always, if not always consciously, an apologia for the existing order.”

György Lukács book History and Class Consciousness

Source: History and Class Consciousness (1968), p. 48

“This is precisely what is decisive in Nietzsche’s conception of art, that he sees it in its essential entirety in terms of the artist; this he does consciously and in explicit opposition to that conception of art which represents it in terms of those who “enjoy” and “experience” it.
That is a guiding principle of Nietzsche’s teaching on art: art must be grasped in terms of creators and producers, not recipients. Nietzsche expresses it unequivocally in the following words (WM, 811): “Our aesthetics heretofore has been a woman’s aesthetics, inasmuch as only the recipients of art have formulated their experiences of ‘what is beautiful.’ In all philosophy to date the artist is missing.” Philosophy of art means “aesthetics” for Nietzsche too—but masculine aesthetics, not feminine aesthetics. The question of art is the question of the artist as the productive, creative one; his experiences of what is beautiful must provide the standard.”

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) German philosopher

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 70

Beauty, Art, Question, Decision

“Our real experiences, day by day and moment by moment, are so intrinsically organised and definite, it does not at first occur to us that the principles which organise and define them, rendering them intelligible, and consciously apprehensible, are and must be the spontaneous products of the mind's own action.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Human Immortality: its Positive Argument, p.297

Intelligence

“For me, Still's pictorial dramas are an extension of the Greek Persephone myth. As he himself has expressed it, his paintings are 'of the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated'. Every shape becomes an organic entity, inviting the multiplicity of associations inherent in all living things. To me they form a theogony of the most elementary consciousness, hardly aware of itself beyond the will to live – a profound and moving experience. [in the catalogue introduction for the first one-man-show of Clyfford Still]”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

in Art of this Century, February 12 – March 2, 1946, Peggy Guggenheim Papers on the work of Clyfford Still; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 203
1940's

Painting

“One reason that Christian theology is so detached from larger intellectual or artistic movements is that it has not suffered consciously a crisis of its expressive forms. At a cultural moment when most humanistic disciplines—not to say, literature and all of the fine arts—have passed through several generations of radical formal innovation, theology is still written as if the conventional forms posed no problems.”

Mark D. Jordan (1953)

Christian Rhetoric: Scraps for a Manifesto

Art, Literature, Problem, Suffering

“(…) no spectator is needed, because your consciousness basically is your reality model. I think that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways. Since the different parts of your brain interact with each other, different parts of your reality model can interact with each other, so the model of you can interact with your model of the outside world, giving rise to the subjective sensation of the former perceiving the latter.”

Max Tegmark book Our Mathematical Universe

Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (2014)

World, Way, Feeling, Thinking

“A poem is learned by heart and then not again repeated. We will suppose that after a half year it has been forgotten: no effort of recollection is able to call it back again into consciousness.”

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909) German psychologist

Source: Memory: A contribution to experimental psychology, 1885, p. 8

Effort, Learning, Heart

“The main defect of idealism in philosophy and history is that it attempts to analyze the properties of societies by inference from the content of the dominant systems of ideas in those societies. But this neglects altogether the fact that there is not a unilateral relationship between values and power: the dominant class is able to disseminate ideas which are the legitimations of its position of dominance. Thus the ideas of freedom and equality which come to the fore in bourgeois society cannot be taken at their “face value,” as directly summing up social reality; on the contrary, the legal freedoms which exist in bourgeois society actually serve to legitimize the reality of contractual obligations in which propertyless wage-labor is heavily disadvantaged as compared to the owners of capital. … While ideologies obviously show continuity over time, neither this continuity. nor any changes which occur, can be explained purely in terms of their internal content. Ideas do not evolve on their own account; they do so as elements of the consciousness of men living in society.”

Anthony Giddens (1938) British sociologist

(describing Marx’s view), pp. 41-42.
Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971)

Men, History, Idea, Reality

“It has been proven psychologically that human beings can only appreciate or apprise, i. e. comprehend and understand, something new, if they can succeed in raising up the subconscious immured in their brain cells into their higher consciousness. If this cannot be achieved, then all preaching is useless. And even the eye has first to learn how to see everything new; it too must therefore be awoken from its latency before it can grasp the seen. Above all, there must be readiness to consider even supposed wonders as the forerunners of forthcoming realities, for only thus can the foundations be laid upon which rational mind can calculate and analyse.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Viktor Schauberger in a letter to Hermann Jaeger, 31st October 1957, Implosion Magazine, No. 103, p. 20 (Callum Coats: Energy Evolution (2000))
Implosion Magazine

Understanding, Reality, Learning

“A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Настоящее произведение искусства делает то, что в сознании воспринимающего уничтожается разделение между ним и художником...
What is Art? (1897)

Art

“The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.”

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) English philosopher

"What is Culture?" (p. 2)
Culture Counts (2007)

World, Art, Literature

“I am an optimist about consciousness: I think that we will eventually have a theory of it, and in this book I look for one. But consciousness is not just business as usual; if we are to make progress, the first thing we must do is face up to the things that make the problem so difficult. Then we can move forward toward a theory, without blinkers and with a good idea of the task at hand.”

David Chalmers book The Conscious Mind

The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (1996)

Books, Idea, Business, Problem

“One thing is quite clear to me; all that is, lives and moves and has its being in consciousness and I am in and beyond that consciousness. (…)”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Awareness and consciousness
Source: "I am That." P.91-2.

“The cultural obsession with the art object is slowly disappearing and being replaced by what might be called "systems consciousness." Actually, this shifts from the direct shaping of matter to a concern for organizing quantities of energy and information. Seen another way, it is a refocusing of aesthetic awareness – based on future scientific-technological evolution – on matter-energy information exchanges and away from the invention of solid artefacts. These new systems prompt us not to look at the skin of objects, but at those meaningful relations within and between their visible boundaries.”

Jack Burnham (1931) American art historian

Source: Beyond Modern Sculpture, 1968, p. 369-70

Art, Way, Future

“Poetry is a magic of pauses … not a thing of tunes, but of heightened consciousness.”

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) American poet and writer

Poetry and Criticism - American Peoples Encyclopedia , Groller , New York 1965

“A small but significant number of angry and historically minded women comprehend the women's revolution in the visionary sense of an end to the catastrophic brotherhood and a return to the former glory and wise equanimity of the matriarchies. We don't know how this will take place exactly, nor the resultant nature of the new social forms, we know that it will take place, and in fact that the process of its development is now irreversibly underway. Of supreme importance in this process is the recovery by modern woman of her mythology as models for theory, consciousness, and action…. The Swiss patrician Jacob Bachofen was one of the first to discover "the female era at the lower seam of history, with its sacerdotal, political, and economic female dominion."”

Jill Johnston book Lesbian Nation

…. The fruits of this research were until recently unavailable except to a few initiates and they now form a cornerstone of the second wave in the feminist revolution....
Lesbian Nation (N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, 1973 (SBN (not ISBN) 671-21433-0)), pp. 248–249.

Women, History, Nature, Sense

“The Buddhist view is more congruent with evolution than are other views. You can actually have beginning-less-ness and still have creation of a particular universe … The part that doesn't jibe for me is the whole notion that consciousness is this separate thing that goes in and out of sentient beings.”

Ursula Goodenough (1943) American biologist

Science and Spirit interview (2004)

Universe, Parting

“Those who think through possible outcomes with discipline, forge connections, in so doing, to other cosmi in which those outcomes are more than mere possibilities. Such a consciousness is measurably, quantitatively different from one that has not undertaken the same work and so, yes, is able to make correct decisions in an Emergence where an untrained mind would be of little use.”

Neal Stephenson book Anathem

Part 11, "Advent." Fraa Jad, on his polycosmic approach to problem-solving.
Anathem (2008)

Thinking, Decision

“Evolution consists of many great revolutionary events taking place quite independently of man's consciously attempting to bring them about. Man is very vain; he likes to feel that he is responsible for all the favorable things that happen, and he is innocent of all the unfavorable happenings. But all the larger evolutionary patternings seeming favorable or unfavorable to man's conditioned reflexing are transpiring transcendentally to any of man's conscious planning or contriving.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

Feeling

“When one's subtle body travels outside of the physical body during the dream state, this experience is sometimes referred to as lucid dreaming. When metaphysicians are able to do this at will, the phenomenon is called astral projection or astral traveling: the ability to consciously leave the physical body and project the subtle body beyond its physical limitations.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume I: Uncovering Spiritual Truths in Psychic Phenomena (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 1: Dreams: A State of Reality, p. 20

Dreams, Travel