Quotes on Consciousness

Yoga is the settling of the mind into silence. When the mind has settled, we are established in our essential nature, which is unbounded Consciousness. Our essential nature is usually overshadowed by the activity of the mind.

The media have just buried the last yuppie, a pathetic creature who had not heard the news that the great pendulum of public consciousness has just swung from Greed to Compassion and from Tex-Mex to meatballs

We bring about a world in consciousness that is partly what is given, and partly what we bring, something that comes into being through this particular conjunction and no other. And the key to this is the kind of attention we pay to the world.

To remember oneself means the same thing as to be aware of oneself - I am. It is not a function, not thinking, not feeling; it is a different state of consciousness.

A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.

Poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions which consciousness wishes to slide by.

Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention writing has transformed human consciousness.

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 in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.

There's not some idea I'm going to create a work that's going to change everybody's consciousness.

The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.

In the child, consciousness rises out of the depths of unconscious psychic life, at first like separate islands, which gradually unite to form a 'continent,' a continuous landmass of consciousness. Progressive mental development means, in effect, extension of consciousness.

People don't know how to place me in their consciousness. They think, 'Oh, you must be here to make me look good. That's what gay guys are, right? You're an accessory for my straight life.' Just because your limited view is that everyone's there to serve you and that you're the only person in the world. It doesn't work that way.

The human race is evolving to the realization that what is happening on the level of consciousness both precedes and determines what happens in the world.

Within psychology and neuroscience, some new and rigorous experimental paradigms for studying consciousness have helped it begin to overcome the stigma that has been attached to the topic for most of this century.

I don't feel uncomfortable in America, but every once in a while, I'm reminded that people don't see me the way I see me. It doesn't change my life, but it gives me a consciousness about it.

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.

A computational device is incapable of developing a mind. We got consciousness not just by being clever.

The young women waking up to feminism now already wake up to more consciousness than my generation had. Even just simple things like equal pay - before you went, in my generation, and asked for a raise, you went through nausea and your palms sweating.

Until white people understand that racism is embedded in everything, including our consciousness and socialisation, then we cannot go forward.

Painting what I experience, translating what I feel, is like a great liberation. But it is also work, self-examination, consciousness, criticism, struggle.

'Cyberspace' is a metaphorical idea which is supposed to be the space where your consciousness is located when you're using computer technology on the Internet, for example, and I'm not entirely sure it's such a useful term, but I think that's what most people mean by it.