Consciousness Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Sixty percent of the newspaper space may be filled with advertising, but that advertising does not command sixty percent of the average reader's attention. We are inured to most of these advertisements and commercials; they wash over us without even dampening the skin. We often do not stop to even read or watch the ads at all, and when we do, they rarely penetrate or connect with our consciousness, let alone transform our identity. True, we are all persuaded and seduced from time to time by these ads, encouraged to make irrational impulsive consumer choices. But that kind of persuasion and seduction is endemic to social life; we run across it constantly and develop mechanisms to filter it out and fend it off.

Rodney A. Smolla

Still, still with Thee, when purple morning breaketh,
When the bird waketh, and the shadows flee;
Fairer than morning, lovelier than the daylight,
Dawns the sweet consciousness, — I am with Thee.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

We are constantly thinking of the great war … which which we think today as a war which saved the Union, and it did indeed save the Union, but it was a war that did a great deal more than that. It created in this country what had never existed before — a national consciousness. It was not the salvation of the Union, it was the rebirth of the Union.

The semimetaphysical problems of the individual and society, of egoism and altruism, of freedom and determinism, either disappear or remain in the form of different phases in the organization of a consciousness that is fundamentally social.

How quickly a truly benevolent act is repaid by the consciousness of having done it!

Just as humans have a prior right to existence over dogs by virtue of being more highly evolved and having a superior consciousness, so women have a prior right to existence over men. The elimination of any male is, therefore, a righteous and good act, an act highly beneficial to women as well as an act of mercy.

Valerie Solanas

The power of our intention and the energy it unleashes are dependent on our levels of coherence and intensity. The affirmation of our positive intentions in thought, feeling and action increases the power of our abilities. Nonetheless, it is important to appreciate that the matrix of physical, emotional, and mental levels of consciousness through which our personal and collective intentions and choices are explored and experienced require a health warning on interpreting the Law of Attraction too simplistically.

There is a built-in sense of indebtedness in the consciousness of man, an awareness of owing gratitude, or being caled upon at certain moments to reciprocate, to answer, to live in a way which is compatible with the grandeur and mystery of living.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

I mean Hank, the movie was great, but the thirty minutes before the movie started was what I love about being a nerd. Because nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff. We don't have to be like, 'Oh yeah that purse is okay' or like, 'Yeah, I like that band's early stuff.' Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-can't-control-yourself-love it. Hank, when people call people nerds, mostly what they are saying is, 'You like stuff', which is just not a good insult at all, like 'You are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness'.

The individuality is the name, the form and superficial culture he acquires from tradition and environment. The uniqueness of man does not lie in the superficial but in complete freedom from the content of his consciousness, which is common to all humanity.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

We can't plead ignorance, only indifference. Those alive today are the generations that came to know better. We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals?

Jonathan Safran Foer

Have full-blown contact now. [The ongoing contacts] have been well documented here with multiple eyewitnesses as well as day and night footage with sound of the ships. Can provide all the eyewitnesses you wish. Two days ago I was hit with three balls of light within a stream of energy, after which a woman appeared to me with a strange headdress used for communication and other higher consciousness and energy works. The ship came in as a golden light from the north. It dropped down low and hovered. I have been [burnt] on my chest right over the heart. It has been photographed. These beings are extremely spiritual and technologically advanced. They have a message. This is not airy fairy, this is for real.

James Gilliland

The severest punishment suffered by a sensitive mind, for injury inflicted upon another, is the consciousness of having done it.

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.

Fernando Pessoa

Mind and matter brought down to the essential, to the consciousness and its object, form a natural whole, and the difficulty does not consist in uniting but in separating them.

What am I doing on a level of consciousness where this is real? That is the first question to ask yourself when you become aware of something ugly or evil or stupid.

All of us are already civilian soldiers, without knowing it…The great stroke of luck for the military class's terrorism is that no one recognizes it. People don't recognize the militarized part of their identity, of their consciousness.

After long absence, of return
To my dear home — Oh, happiness!
To lie in blissful consciousness
Of all around: The picture there —
The books — the flower-glass filled with care
By a kind hand — And then to know,
'Twas but to rise, and meet below
Such a heart's welcome!

Caroline Anne Southey

I want the world to recognize with me the open door of every consciousness

Only when the habit of one's consciousness to see in paintings bits of nature, Madonna's and shameless nudes.... has disappeared, shall we see a pure painting composition. I have transformed myself into the nullity of forms and pulled myself out of the circle of things, out of the circle-horizon in which the artist and forms of nature are locked.

Kazimir Malevich

The level of consciousness you choose to tune in to each moment of each day will determine the quality of your experience of the world.

As we have already glimpsed and will continue to discover, we are able to expand our awareness beyond the perceived limitations of our own person and access the dimensions of a transpersonal consciousness. As we open ourselves to the realization of the in-formed universe, this shift in our collective awareness heralds a resolution of the schisms that have divided us for so long—both among and within us

Days were the units which mattered most, being divided from each other by the astounding phenomenon of losing and regaining consciousness. (How brave, how trustful people are, to dare to go to sleep!)

Television's overpowering images of Black deviance — its regularity and frequency — are impossible to ignore. These negative images have been seared into our collective consciousness. It is no surprise that most Americans wrongly believe that Blacks are responsible for the majority of crime.

Katheryn Russell-Brown

The primary meaning of the words "modern," "modernity," with which recent times have baptised themselves, brings out very sharply that feeling of "the height of time" which I am at present analysing. "Modern" is what is "in the fashion, "that is to say, the new fashion or modification which has arisen over against the old traditional fashions used in the past. The word "modern" then expresses a consciousness of a new life, superior to the old one, and at the same time an imperative call to be at the height of one's time. For the "modern" man, not to be "modern" means to fall below the historic level.

José Ortega y Gasset