Consciousness Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The predominance of mind is no more than a stage in the evolution of consciousness. We need to go on to the next stage now as a matter of urgency; otherwise, we will be destroyed by the mind, which has grown into a monster.

What is the use of education if we do not become creative, conscious and truly intelligent? Real education does not mean knowing how to read and write. Any stupid person, any fool can know how to read and write. We need to have intelligence and it only awakens within us when the consciousness awakens.

Samael Aun Weor

American families are in the process of passing along a $9 trillion legacy from one generation to the next. This is a lot of money, but it is distributed very unevenly..... Hand in hand with this money, I submit, what is really being handed down from generation to generation is the profound legacy of reproducing racial inequality. The legacy is difficult to discern because the language of family heritage hides it from our political consciousness.

The so-called miraculous powers of a great master are a natural accompaniment to his exact understanding of subtle laws that operate in the inner cosmos of consciousness.

Paramahansa Yogananda

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

Consciousness is the ultimate Reality; compared with it, all else is illusion.

Harold W. Percival

Knowledge itself is 'I'. The nature of (this) knowledge is existence-consciousness-bliss.

Ramana Maharshi

A prejudice may be an unreasoned judgment, he [Hibben] pointed out, but an unreasoned judgment is not necessarily an illogical judgment. … First, there are those judgments whose verification has simply dropped out of memory. … The second type of unreasoned judgments we hold is the opinions we adopt from others … The third class of judgments in Professor Hibben's list comprises those which have subconscious origin. The material that furnishes their support does not reach the focal point of consciousness, but psychology insists upon its existence.

Behavior now must be changed from within the new consciousness rather than from Mosaic laws carving behavior from without. Sin and desire are now within conscious desire and conscious contrition, rather than in the external behaviors of the decalogue and the penances of temple sacrifice and community punishment. The divine kingdom to be regained is psychological not physical. It is metaphorical not literal. It is "within" not in extenso.

Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole — so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.

Common experience shows how much rarer is moral courage than physical bravery. A thousand men will march to the mouth of the cannon where one man will dare espouse an unpopular cause... True courage and manhood come from the consciousness of the right attitude toward the world, the faith in one's purpose, and the sufficiency of one's own approval as a justification for one's own acts.

Clarence Darrow

The overly specific sexual orientation, then, reflects a basic division in consciousness. It not only separates a man from his own intuitions and emotions to some extent, or a woman from her own intellect, but it effectively provides a civilization in which mind and heart, fact and revelation, appear completely divorced. To some degree each person is at war with the psyche, for all of an individual's human characteristics must be denied unless they fit in with those considered normal to the sexual identity.

Although we may see 1,000 suns reflected in 1,000 pots of water, there is only one sun. When we see the consciousness within all of us as one and the same, we will be able to develop a mind that considers the needs of others before our own.

Mata Amritanandamayi

The Hebrew Bible, as a document, displays an astonishing lack of textual self-consciousness. It alleges to know what God thinks, but it does not know itself. It is not aware that it is called the Hebrew Bible. … Jews and Christians have venerated an unself-conscious artifact, one whose embarrassing gaps in self-knowledge have always had to be filled in by later interpreters.

Jacques Berlinerblau

By banning psychedelic research we have not only given up the study of an interesting drug or group of substances, but also abandoned one of the most promising approaches to the understanding of the human mind and consciousness.

I felt time in full stream, and I felt consciousness in full stream joining it, like the rivers.

Every morning, at the balcony, after establishing a conscious contact with each of those who are present, I identify myself with the Supreme Lord and merge myself completely in Him. Then my body, completely passive, is nothing but a channel through which the Lord passes freely His forces and pours on all His Light, His Consciousness and His Joy, according to each one's receptivity.

I believe I've passed the age of consciousness and righteous rage.
I've found that just surviving is a noble fight.
I once believed in causes too; I had my pointless points of view.
And life went on no matter who as wrong or right.

We do not step out of the world when we pray; we merely see the world in a different setting. The self is not the hub but the spoke of the revolving wheel. It is precisely the function of prayer to shift the center of living from self-consciousness to self-surrender.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Care for the race, even if the individual must suffer — this must be the keynote of our future. This was the guiding principle which underlay all the discussions of the Second International Congress of Eugenics in 1921. Not quantity but quality must be the aim in the development of each nation, to make men fit to maintain their places in the struggle for existence. We must be concerned above all with racial values; every race must seek out and develop and improve its own racial characteristics. Racial consciousness is not pride of race, but proper respect for the Purity of race is today found in but one nation — the Scandinavian.

Henry Fairfield Osborn

Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.

Although the content of consciousness depends in large measure on neuronal activity, awareness itself does not.To me, it seems more and more reasonable to suggest that the mind may be a distinct and different essence.

Wilder Penfield

We/I am a son/daughter of God. In fact, we are all expressions/projections of the Infinite Consciousness, which is love, that is what I mean when I say "I am a son of god "GOD"!"

Truths are known to us in two ways: some are known directly, and of themselves; some through the medium of other truths. The former are the subject of Intuition, or Consciousness; the latter, of Inference; the latter of Inference. The truths known by Intuition are the original premisses, from which all others are inferred.

John Stuart Mill

Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of the consciousness and the burning up of the ego.