Consciousness Quotes
-
The human being is that space in which the comprehensive compassion that pervades the universe from the very beginning now begins to surface --within consciousness. As compared with the natural displays of compassion by other creatures that is not necessarily 'within consciousness. That's the only difference. We didn't create compassion, but it's flowing through us-or it could. The phase change that we're in seems, to me, to depend upon that comprehensive compassion unfurling in the human species.
Brian Swimme
-
The disenfranchised offspring, along with an entire ageless class of human discards, know only that they are doomed. They are drawn to spikes and pentagrams, gasoline, guitars screaming like whips, MIDI-programmed Thanatos, with sufficient amplitude to occupy that hollow space where consciousness once resided. These Dionysians obliterate themselves by removing filters, ultimately becoming insensate with sensation. This mode of behaviour originates in the superstitious belief that transcendence is acquired in the precise ratio by which reason is destroyed.
Adam Parfrey
-
Thinking in art and morals and even mathematics is neither the reflection in consciousness of a mechanical order in the brain nor the tracing with the mind’s eye of some empirical order in its object, but an endeavour to realize in thought an ideal order which would satisfy an inner demand. The nearer thought comes to its goal, the more it finds itself under constraint by that goal, and dominated in its creative effort by aesthetic or moral or logical relevance. These relations of relevance are not physical or psychological relations. They are normative relations that can enter into the mental current because that current is . . . teleological. Their operation marks the presence of a different type of law, which supervenes upon physical and psychological laws when purpose takes control.
Brand Blanshard
-
Consciousness is the foundation of all thinking; and thinking is the foundation of all consciousness.
M. Scott Peck
-
I have a similar affection for the parenthesis (but I always take most of my parentheses out, so as not to call undue attention to the glaring fact that I cannot think in complete sentences, that I think only in short fragments or long, run-on thought relays that the literati call stream of consciousness but I still like to think of as disdain for the finality of the period).
Sarah Vowell
-
The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.
William James
-
Consciousness is a singular for which there is no plural.
Erwin Schrodinger
-
We do not realize how deeply our starting assumptions affect the way we go about looking for and interpreting the data we collect. We should recognize that nonhuman organisms need not meet every new definition of human language, tool use, mind, or consciousness in order to have versions of their own that are worthy of serious study. We have set ourselves too much apart, grasping for definitions that will distinguish man from all other life on the planet. We must rejoin the great stream of life from whence we arose and strive to see within it the seeds of all we are and all we may become.
Sue Savage-Rumbaugh
-
You can have relatively high levels of class consciousness with a lower level of class militancy than one would have expected.
Ernest Mandel
-
Although the content of consciousness depends in large measure on neuronal activity, awareness itself does not.To me, it seems more and more c to suggest that the mind may be a distinct and different essence.
Wilder Penfield
-
The ultimate Consciousness is always present everywhere. It is beyond space and time, with not before or after. It is undeniable and obvious. So what can be said about it?
Abhinavagupta
-
Like most qualities, cuteness is delineated by what it isn't. Most people aren't cute at all, or if so they quickly outgrow their cuteness ... Elegance, grace, delicacy, beauty, and a lack of self-consciousness: a creature who knows he is cute soon isn't.
William S. Burroughs