Consciousness Quotes

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That higher and "complete" man is begotten by the "unknown" father and born from Wisdom, and it is he who, in the figure of the puer aeternus—"vultu mutabilis albus et ater"—represents our totality, which transcends consciousness. It was this boy into whom Faust had to change, abandoning his inflated onesidedness which saw the devil only outside. Christ's "Except ye become as little children" is a prefiguration of this, for in them the opposites lie close together; but what is meant is the boy who is born from the maturity of the adult man, and not the unconscious child we would like to remain.

What is important, however, is that each day individuals are acquiring ever more consciousness of the need for their incorporation into society and, at the same time, of their importance as the motor of that society.

Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human.

I know where my lane is, and I know how to stay in my lane. My lane is evolving the consciousness of people.

Philosophy … should not imagine that specialized work in epistemological theory, or whatever else prides itself on being research, is actually philosophy. Yet a philosophy forswearing all of that must in the end be irreconcilably at odds with the dominant consciousness. Nothing else raises it above the suspicion of apologetics. Philosophy that satisfies its own intention, and does not childishly skip behind its own history and the real one, has its lifeblood in the resistance against the common practices of today and what they serve, against the justification of what happens to be the case.

Theodor W. Adorno

The most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness.

Not your flesh nor bones shall bejudge in the A'khira (Judgement day), but your brain, the centre of consciousness where you reside. You as a soul shall be judged.

When men are employed, they are best contented; for on the days they worked they were good-natured and cheerful, and, with the consciousness of having done a good day's work, they spent the evening jollily; but on our idle days they were mutinous and quarrelsome.

Benjamin Franklin

The unconscious wants to flow into consciousness in order to reach the light, but at the same time it continually thwarts itself, because it would rather remain unconscious. That is to say, God wants to become man, but not quite.

What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and education of the billions who are its victims.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Consciousness presupposes itself, and asking about its origin is an idle and just as sophistical a question as that old one, What came first, the fruit-tree or the stone? Wasn't there a stone out of which came the first fruit-tree? Wasn't there a fruit-tree from which came the first stone? Journals and Papers, Hannay, 1996 1843 IVA49

Søren Kierkegaard

To excite opposition and inflame malevolence is the unhappy privilege of courage made arrogant by consciousness of strength.

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and considered by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being.

The spinning wheel means national consciousness and a contribution by every individual to a definite constructive national work.

Consciousness succumbs all too easily to unconscious influences, and these are often truer and wiser than our conscious thinking.

For as only one thing is necessary, and as the theme of the talk is the willing of only one thing: hence the consciousness before God of one's eternal responsibility to be an individual is that one thing necessary.

Søren Kierkegaard

Our business is to wake up. We have to find ways in which to detect the whole of reality in the one illusory part which our self-centered consciousness permits us to see. We must not live thoughtlessly, taking our illusion for the complete reality, but at the same time we must not live too thoughtfully in the sense of trying to escape from the dream state. We must be continuously on watch for ways in which we may enlarge our consciousness.

Complexes are psychic contents which are outside the control of the conscious mind. They have been split off from consciousness and lead a separate existence in the unconscious, being at all times ready to hinder or to reinforce the conscious intentions.

We fatuously hoped that we might pluck from the human tragedy itself a consciousness of a common destiny which should bring its own healing, that we might extract from life's very misfortunes a power of cooperation which should be effective against them.

All of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.

Nature seems very conversant with the rules of pure mathematics, as our own mathematicians have formulated them in their studies, out of their own inner consciousness and without drawing to any appreciable extent on their experience of the outer world.

Streams of ideals that originated in the summit of our past, flowing underground in the depth of India's soul, the ideals of simplicity of life, clarity of spiritual vision, purity of heart, harmony with the universe and consciousness of the infinite personality in all creation and the urge to bring these to the surface of our daily use and purification.

Slowly but inexorably crawling upon my consciousness and rising above every other impression, came a dizzying fear of the unknown; a fear all the greater because I could not analyse it, and seeming to concern a stealthily approaching menace; not death, but some nameless, unheard-of thing inexpressibly more ghastly and abhorrent.

H. P. Lovecraft

I am not my thoughts, emotions, sense perceptions, and experiences. I am not the content of my life. I am Life. I am the space in which all things happen. I am consciousness.