Quotes about Consciousness

A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with.

Everyone is born with the faculty to see the miraculous. You have to choose not to.

The actual process of thinking -in any discipline- is an unconscious affair...The truth is that there is a process here to which we have no access.

If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them? People

Time went on grey, uncloured, like a long journey where she sat unconscious as the landscape unrolled beside her.

On and on we go, for the mental consciousness labours under the illusion that there is somewhere to go to, a goal to consciousness. Whereas of course there is no goal. Consciousness is an end in itself. We torture ourselves getting somewhere, and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to.

You've got to lapse out before you can know what sensual reality is, lapse into unkowingness, and give up your volition...You've got to learn not-to-be before you can come into being.

And Clifford the same. All that talk! All that writing! All that wild struggling to push himself forwards! It was just insanity. And it was getting worse, really maniacal. Connie felt washed-out with fear. But at least, Clifford was shifting his grip from her on to Mrs Bolton. He did not know it. Like many insane people, his insanity might be measured by the things he was not aware of, the great desert tracts in his consciousness.

We must start from what seems a be a nullity, the unknowable, the inexpressible, the creative mystery wherein we are established. We cannot become more exact than this without introducing falsehood.

But so many people... have only got their minds tacked on to their physical corpses.

I look at my hands, and wonder what they are doing there. That water there ripples right through me. I'm sure that I am that rippling. It runs right through me, and I through it. There are no barriers between us... A sort of disseminates consciousness, that's all there is of me. I feel as if my body were laying empty, as if I were in the other things - clouds and water-... the individual bodily me is discarded. But if so then I am not alive here. I'm sure it would destroy me.

He had no future in the world: of that he was conscious. He had no future in this life. Even if he lived on, it would only be a kind of enduring. But he felt the after-life belonged to him. Future in the world he could not give her. Life in the world he had not to offer her. Better go on alone. Surely better go on alone.