Consciousness Quotes - page 4

There is but one indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, - the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists. (William James)
As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.
William James
The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other.
William James
The unconsciousness of man is the consciousness of God.
Henry David Thoreau
Formerly, his heart had been as a locked casket with its treasure inside but now the casket was empty, and the lock was broken. Left groping in darkness, with his prop utterly gone, Silas had inevitably a sense, though a dull and half-despairing one, that if any help came to him it must come from without and there was a slight stirring of expectation at the sight of his fellow-men, a faint consciousness of dependence on their goodwill.
George Eliot
Man's consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it.
Vladimir Lenin
Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.
Zadie Smith
The essential trait in the moral consciousness, is the control of some feeling or feelings by some other feeling or feelings.
Herbert Spencer
If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature-the nearest thing to a sacramental human activity acknowledged by secular society-it is because one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what's there.
Susan Sontag
Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility.
Susan Sontag
Art, and, above all, music, has a fundamental function, which is to catalyze the sublimation that it can bring about through all means of expression. It must aim through fixations which are landmarks, to draw [one] towards a total exaltation in which the individual mingles, losing his consciousness in a truth immediate, rare, enormous, and perfect. If a work of art succeeds in this undertaking even for a single moment, it attains its goal. (Iannis Xenakis)
Human nature is the same now as when Adam hid from the presence of God; the consciousness of wrong makes us unwilling to meet those whom we have offended.
Matthew Simpson
Parapsychology seems to be growing further away from the progress and excitement of the rest of consciousness studies.
Susan Blackmore
Consciousness is an illusion constructed by the memes.
Susan Blackmore
Irony is a clear consciousness of an eternal agility, of the infinitely abundant chaos.
Friedrich Schlegel
It is what makes conscious of the conditions and laws of observing which applied in this manner become a theme on its own. The activity of consciousness depending on the way the work itself proceeds, becomes the subject of my attention this way and it is precisely because of this voyeuristic attitude toward the own observation and experience of the subject that the conscious analytic dimension in the work shows.
Antoni Tàpies
We are concerned with similar states of consciousness and relationship to the world... If previous abstractions paralleled the scientific and objective preoccupations of our times, ours are finding a pictorial equivalent for man's new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self.
Mark Rothko
Our own consciousness is incapable of having produce the universe. God, therefore, exists. That is to say, there is no reason for not applying the term God, Theos, to the intimate essence.
Ezra Pound
To realize freedom the mind has to learn to look at life, which is a vast movement, without the bondage of time, for freedom lies beyond the field of consciousness care for watching, but don't stop and interpret "I am free," then you're living in a memory of something that has gone before.
Bruce Lee
Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in 'changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them'.
Paulo Freire
The only conclusion you can draw from the real historical movement is that by and large, in day-to-day life, what Lenin called trade union consciousness dominates the working class. I would call it elementary class consciousness of the working class. (Ernest Mandel)
You need a vanguard organization in order to overcome the dangerous potential brought about by the uneven development of class militancy and class consciousness.
Ernest Mandel
I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.
Isaac Rosenberg
Slowly but inexorably crawling upon my consciousness and rising above every other impression, came a dizzying fear of the unknown; a fear all the greater because I could not analyse it, and seeming to concern a stealthily approaching menace; not death, but some nameless, unheard-of thing inexpressibly more ghastly and abhorrent.
H. P. Lovecraft
The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd: the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world's existence. All these half-tones of the soul's consciousness create a raw landscape within us, a sun eternally setting on what we are.
Fernando Pessoa