Consciousness Quotations
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MIND, CONSCIOUSNESS
The actuality of thought is life.
Aristotle 384-322BC
SELF AWARENESS, FLAWS,
INSIGHT, HUMILITY
The greatest of faults...is to be conscious of none.
Carlyle
DENIAL, AWARENESS, SLEEP, FACE, MIND-BODY, CONSCIOUSNESS
Animals awaken first facially, then bodily. Men's bodies wake
up before their faces do. The animal sleeps within its body;
man sleeps with his body in his mind.
Chazal
ART, CONSCIOUSNESS
Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
Jean Cocteau
CHARACTER, PEACE, CALM, RELIGION, FAITH, GOD
"He was peaceful because of his conscious relation to God."
S.T. Coleridge
SELF CONTROL, THOUGHT, CONSCIOUSNESS, COGNITION
The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we
recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.
Charles Darwin
HABIT, REFLEXES, CONSCIOUSNESS, AWARENESS
It is notorious how powerful is the force of habit. The most
complex and difficult movements can in time be performed
without the least effort or consciousness.
Charles Darwin, Expression of The Emotions In Man And Animals
"To be conscious you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge."
Disraeli, Sybil book 1 chap 1
A human being is part of the whole, called by us "universe," a
part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, has
thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest-- a
kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a
kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires
and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task
must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our
circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the
whole of nature in its beauty.
Einstein
In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. he lets
down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up
something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this
thing with his normal experiences, and out of the mixture he
makes a work of art.
E.M. Forster
ACTION
Words are good, but there is something better, The best is not
to be explained by words. The spirit in which we act is the
chief matter. Action can only be understood and represented by
the spirit. No one knows what he is doing while he is acting
rightly, but of what is wrong we are always conscious.
Goethe
Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness,
which unites your body to your thoughts.
Thich Nhat Hanh
FREEDOM
The history of the world is none other than the progress of the
consciousness of freedom.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of History
Reality is the child of two parents; the inexhaustible
environment of information, and the ineffable conscious mind.
Robert G. Jahn
...Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as
we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst
all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there
lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We
may go through life without suspecting their existence; but
apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in
all their completeness, definite types of mentality which
probably somewhere have their field of application and
adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be
final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite
disregarded. How to regard them is the question,- for they are
so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness.
William James
Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or
morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential
being. They make use of a very small portion of their
potential being. They make use of a very small portion of
their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in
general, much like a man, who, out of his whole bodily
organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his
little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much
greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
William James
SADNESS, DEPRESSION, SUBCONSCIOUS
In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which
the ulimate mystery of things works sadly...
Wm. James, Is Life Worth Living
ART
Picasso only registers the deformities which have not yet
penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror which goes
"fast" like a watch-- sometimes.
Kafka
The danger of psychedelic drugs, the danger of mind-opening,
the danger of consciousness expansion, the danger of inner
discovery is a danger to the establishment.
Timothy Leary
"The different basic needs are related to each other in a
hierarchical order such that gratification of one need and its
consequent removal from the center of the stage brings about
not a state of rest or Stoic apathy, but rather, the
emergence into consciousness of another, "higher" need;
wanting and desiring continues, but at a "higher" level.
...The appetite for growth is whetted rather than allayed by
gratification. Growth is, in itself, a rewarding and exciting
process, e.g., the fulfilling of yearnings and ambitions, like
that of being a good doctor, the acquisition of admired
skills, like playing the violin or being a good carpenter; the
steady increase of understanding about people or about the
universe, or about oneself; the development of
creativeness in whatever field, or most important, simply the
ambition to be a good human being."
Maslow, Abraham
DISCIPLINE, CONTROL
When we analyze will with all the tools modern psychoanalysis
brings us, we shall find ourselves pushed back to the level of
attention as the seat of will. The effort which goes into the
exercise of the will is really effort of attention; the strain
in willing is the effort to keep the consciousness clear, ie.,
the strain of keeping the attention focused.
Rollo May, Love and Will
To me there is in happiness an element of self-forgetfulness.
You lose yourself in something outside yourself when you are
happy; just as when you are desperately miserable you are
intensely conscious of yourself, are a solid
little lump of ego, weighing a ton.
Priestley, J.B.
Happiness lies in the consciousness we have of it, and by no
means in the way the future keeps its promises.
George Sand Handsome Lawrence, ch.3
Until thic control becomes a mechanical habit, it wil be
necessary to give a lot of thought to it... Later, this
relaxing of the muscles should become a normal phenomenon.
This habit should be developed daily, constantly,
systematically... It should proceed while we are going to bed
or getting up, dining, walking, working, resting, in moments
of joy and of sorrow. The 'controller" of our muscles must be
made part of our physical make-up, our
second nature. Only then will it cease to interfere when we
are doing creative work. If we relax our muscles only during
special hours set aside for that purpose, we cannot get
results, because such exercises are not custom-forming,
they cannot become unconscious, mechanical habits.
Stanislavski
Extreme busyness... is a symptom of deficient vitality. There
is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about , who are
scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some
conventional occupationBring these fellows into
the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will see how
they ine for their desk or their study. They have no
curiosity; they cannot give themselves over
to random provocations; they do not take pleasure in the
exercise of their faculties for its own sake. ...It is no good
speaking to such folk; they cannot be idle, their nature is
not generous enough, and they pass those hours in a sort of
coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the
gold-mill.
R.L. Stevenson, An Apology For Idlers
If you're not conscious of it, you are destined to live out the
unresolved patterns of your parents.
Barbara Streisand
FEEDBACK, SELF CONTROL, VOLITION
By a feedback system we mean one in which a predetermined state
is achieved by utilizing information about the difference
between the achieved state and the predetermined state to
reduce this difference to zero. The thermostat is a
familiar example. ...A feedback system may or may not employ
consciousness.
Sylvan S. Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciusness, Volume 1 The Positive Affects
AWARENESS
Consciousness of our powers augments them.
Vauvenargues
RELAX, CASUAL, CHILD
I do not think that any civilization can be called complete
until it has progressed from sophistication to
unsophistication, and made a conscious return to simplicity of
thinking and living.
Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living
SUBCONSCIOUS, SELF AWARENESS, SELF KNOWLEDGE, EVIL
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately
wicked: who can know it?
Old Testament: Jeremiah, xvii, 9
ART
The conscious utterance of thought, by speech or action, to any
end, is art.
Emerson
MACROs --PEAK PERFORMANCE, WRITING, CREATIVITY, IMAGINATION,
TIMING
"All poets have signalized their consciousness of rare moments
when they were superior to themselves, --when a light, a
freedom, a power came to them which lifted them to
performances far better than they could reach at other times."
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (Inspiration)
"Father of light and life, thou God Supreme!
O teach me what is good; teach me Thyself!
Save me from folly, vanity, and vice,
From every low pursuit; and feed my soul
With knowledge, conscious peace and virtue pure;
Sacred, Substantial, never-fading bliss!"
"Any new formula which suddenly emerges in our consciousness
has its roots in long trains of thought; it is virtually old
when it first makes its appearance among the recognized
growths of our intellect. Any crystalline group of
musical words has had a long and still period to form in."
Holmes, O.W.THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST TABLE
HAPPINESS
Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness.
Johnson, Boswell's life of Johnson vol II, 9
"Sir, that all who are happy are equally happy , is not true. A
peasant and a philosopher may be equally satisfied, but not
equally happy. Happiness consists in the multiplicity of
agreeable consciousness. A peasant has not capacity for having
equal happiness with a philosopher.''
Boswell's Johnson
SELF CONSCIOUSNESS
"Nothing prevents us from being natural so much as the desire
to appear so."
La Rochefoucauld #431
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