Quotes about consciousness

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“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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?”

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

“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.”

“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…”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Self-consciousness kills 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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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?”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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]”

“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.”

“(…) 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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. (…)”

“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.”

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

“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."”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“And in a flash I understood the meaning of sex. It is a craving for the mingling of consciousness, whose symbol is the mingling of bodies. Every time a man and a woman slake their thirst in the strange waters of the other's identity, they glimpse the immensity of their freedom.”

“We now come to the underpinning contention of the previous monograph. Psychological phenomena, especially those involved in learning and education, stem from or are related to states of consciousness. Using the argument which relates the information available about conscious processes to the type of experimental situation, we maintain that the basic unit of psychological /educational observation is a conversation. In order to test hypotheses and explicate the conversational transactions, it is necessary to invoke various tools and explanatory constructs. These are coherent enough to count when interlocked as a theory, and this theory was dubbed conversation theory.”

“But besides relatedness and influence I should like to see that my colors remain, as much as possible, a 'face' –their own 'face', as it was achieved – uniquely — and I believe consciously - in Pompeian wall-paintings - by admitting coexistence of such polarities as being dependent and independent — being dividual and individual.
Often, with paintings, more attention is drawn to the outer, physical, structure of the color means than to the inner, functional, structure of the color action... Here now follow a few details of the technical manipulation of the colorants which in my painting usually are oil paints and only rarely casein paints.
On a ground of the whitest white available – half or less absorbent – and built up in layers – on the rough side of panels of untempered Masonite – paint is applied with a palette knife directly from the tube to the panel and as thin and even as possible in one primary coat. Consequently there is no under or over painting or modeling or glazing and no added texture – so-called... As a result this kind of painting presents an inlay (intarsia) of primary thin paints films – not layered, laminated, nor mixed wet, half or more dry, paint skins.
Such homogeneous thin and primary films will dry, that is, oxidize, of course, evenly – and so without physical and/or chemical complication – to a healthy, durable paint surface of increasing luminosity.”