Consciousness Quotes

Personal growth will cause a ripple effect as the growth in consciousness of enough people, one by one, can create general change, and lasting social improvements.

~ Bud Harris

I don´t listen to hoax or rumours, but I like a good sense of humour. If you are wrong, be wise, apologize. Otherwise, be kind and rewind. Gone with the wind...

~ Ana Claudia Antunes

Life probably does not hand us any more visceral experience of how we mistakenly define ourselves than by means of our physical body. From the day we were born, the message we received from the world was that we are our body. This was the first great lie we were given by means of the collective consciousness of humankind, which has always valued itself from the outside in.

~ Dennis Merritt Jones

Helping OthersWhen we live our lives in happy, compassionate and constructive ways we set an example for others, which they may or may not choose to follow. There is no need for convincing anyone to what we know as good for us. Our actions always speak louder than words, as beautiful as they may be. Be yourself riding the wave of change, and you will lighten up assisting many others to do the same if this is what they prefer.

~ Raphael Zernoff

When we convene a group for gender healing and reconciliation, we are collectively taking similar action. We stretch ourselves to a larger consciousness and grace that is beyond our capacity, but within our reach.

~ William Keepin

When you discover the difference between consciousness and the brain, you will discover yourself.

~ Jenna Alatari

The path that takes us from here, to the fulfillment of our life purpose is who we are. We are the bridge to our destiny. (From the Secrets to Divine Manifestations)

~ Alain Yaovi M. Dagba

Memoir writing draws on all aspects of who we are, body, mind and soul. We are challenged to dig deep, to remember, and once again inhabit the skin of who we were and what we have learned. Writing memoir is an act of testimony, witnessing, healing. When you write a memoir, you draw upon layers of your consciousness and discover your true nature, your essential self, and are transformed the process.” Linda Joy Meyer

~ Rossandra White

This book attempts to record a journey to restoration that applies to ordinary people like you and I. It is a shot towards healing. A step headed for a new consciousness. It emerges from a moment in time where all seems lost.

~ Phindiwe Nkosi

The only thing we need to heal is the belief that we are not already whole.

~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

You ever try holding, say, even a single chapter of a novel in your head? Consciously? All at once?

~ Peter Watts

And he knew he would not be travelling home. If he had to wear a donkey jacket and wait for fifty years, then he would wait. At last there was a place in the world where he had reason to be, a place that had meaning. For days, without realising it, he had sensed this meaning everywhere, in the streets, houses, ruins and temples of Rome. It could not be said of the feeling that it was 'filled with pleasurable expectation'. Rome and its millennia were not by nature associated with happiness, and what Mihály anticipated from the future was not what is usually conjured up by 'pleasurable expectation'. He was awaiting his fate, the logical, appropriately Roman, ending.

~ Antal Szerb

As you begin to look deeply into the mystery of your own evolution, in place of good and evil you will find only stories, finished or unfinished.

~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

If your mind carries a heavy burden of past, you will experience more of the same. The past perpetuates itself through lack of presence. The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future.

~ Eckhart Tolle

But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.

~ Audre Lorde

I don't believe that consciousness is generated by the brain. I believe that the brain is more of a reciever of consciousness.

~ Graham Hancock

Hell, in my opinion, is never finding your true self and never living your own life or knowing who you are.

~ John Bradshaw

If you don't believe in God, it may help to remember this great line of Geneen Roth's: that awareness is learning to keep yourself company. And then learn to be more compassionate company, as if you were somebody you are fond of and wish to encourage. I doubt that you would read a close friend's early efforts and, in his or her presence, roll your eyes and snicker. I doubt that you would pantomime sticking your finger down your throat. I think you might say something along the lines of, 'Good for you. We can work out some of the problems later, but for now, full steam ahead!

~ Anne Lamott

We do not realize how deeply our starting assumptions affect the way we go about looking for and interpreting the data we collect. We should recognize that nonhuman organisms need not meet every new definition of human language, tool use, mind, or consciousness in order to have versions of their own that are worthy of serious study. We have set ourselves too much apart, grasping for definitions that will distinguish man from all other life on the planet. We must rejoin the great stream of life from whence we arose and strive to see within it the seeds of all we are and all we may become.

~ Sue Savage-Rumbaugh

I was struck by an awful thought, the kind that cannot be taken back once it escapes into the open air of consciousness; it seemed to me that this was not a place you go to live. It was a place you go to die.

~ John Green

Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.

~ Albert Camus

She had always lived her best life in dreams. She knew no greater pleasure than that moment of passage into the other place, when her limbs grew warm and heavy and the sparkling darkness behind her lids became ordered and doors opened; when conscious thought grew owl's wings and talons and became other than conscious.

~ John Crowley

Attempts to wake before our time are often punished, especially by those who love us most. Because they, bless them, are asleep. They think anyone who wakes up, or who, still asleep, realizes that what is taken to be real is a ‘dream’ is going crazy.

~ R.d. Laing

You sea! I resign myself to you also-I guess what you mean, I behold from the beach your crooked fingers, I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me.We must have a turn together,I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land,Cushion me soft, rock me billowy drowse,Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you.

~ Walt Whitman

How I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or better still, to none at all.

~ W.g. Sebald

Pain and darkness have been our lot since the Fall of Man. But there must be some hope that we can rise to a higher level ... that consciousness can evolve to a plane more benevolent than its counterpoint of a universe hardwired to indifference.

~ Dan Simmons

I know that these mental disturbances of mine are not dangerous and give no promise of a storm; to express what I complain of in apt metaphor, I am distressed, not by a tempest, but by sea-sickness.

~ Seneca

The bite of conscience is indecent.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I honestly didn't believe I could bear any more suffering. I was convinced that the child within me was just too young to endure all this, much less understand it. She just wanted to be normal. But another part of me knew that to become normal, all the pieces of this puzzle had to become conscious.p164

~ Suzie Burke

Was it possible that Ranulph, too, was a real person, a person inside whose mind things happened? He had thought that he himself was the only real person in a field of human flowers. For Master Nathaniel that was a moment of surprise, triumph, tenderness, alarm.

~ Hope Mirrlees

For as long as I could remember, I had been transparent to myself, unselfconscious, learning, doing, most of every day. Now I was in my own way; I myself was a dark object I could not ignore. I couldn't remember how to forget myself. I didn't want to think about myself, to reckon myself in, to deal with myself every livelong minute on top of everything else - but swerve as I might, I couldn't avoid it. I was a boulder blocking my own path. I was a dog barking between my own ears, a barking dog who wouldn't hush. So this was adolescence. Is this how the people around me had died on their feet - inevitably, helplessly? Perhaps their own selves eclipsed the sun for so many years the world shriveled around them, and when at least their inescapable orbits had passed through these dark egoistic years it was too late, they had adjusted. Must I then lose the world forever, that I had so loved? Was it all, the whole bright and various planet, where I had been so ardent about finding myself alive, only a passion peculiar to children, that I would outgrow even against my will?

~ Annie Dillard

I swoon into a standing eight count. Goddamn, I actually feel my consciousness want to detach and hide like a turtle retreating into a hopelessly soft shell that won't save anyone.

~ Paul Tremblay

If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.

~ Daniel C. Dennett

Consider this:1. Would you ride in a car whose driver was on the consciousness-expanding entheogenic drug LSD?And here's a bonus question:2. Why does an expanded consciousness include the inability to operate a motor vehicle?

~ Brad Warner

We must try to remember everything, every movement, every stretch, every convulsion that made us how we move as we readily grow in our outer body that encompasses the planets, the suns and the moons in every other body that we touch, in every other mouth that we kissed, in every other language that we try to comprehend; for they are not the outside of a stranger, nor are they just images of our psyche, but the very being of ourselves, the dimensional levels of our very existence weaving colours in the tapestry of creation, yet the very non-existence of the template is proof of consciousness, of ascension, of Life.

~ Aainaa-Ridtz

The act of consciousness is central; otherwise we are overrun by the complexes. The hero in each of us is required to answer the call of individuation. We must turn away from the cacaphony of the outerworld to hear the inner voice. When we can dare to live its promptings, then we achieve personhood. We may become strangers to those who thought they knew us, but at least we are no longer strangers to ourselves.

~ James Hollis

Something as superfluous as play is also an essential feature of our consciousness. If you ask children why they like to play, they will say, Because it's fun. But that invites the next question: What is fun? Actually, when children play, they are often trying to reenact complex human interactions in simplified form. Human society is extremely sophisticated, much too involved for the developing brains of young children, so children run simplified simulations of adult society, playing games such as doctor, cops and robber, and school. Each game is a model that allows children to experiment with a small segment of adult behavior and then run simulations into the future. (Similarly, when adults engage in play, such as a game of poker, the brain constantly creates a model of what cards the various players possess, and then projects that model into the future, using previous data about people's personality, ability to bluff, etc. The key to games like chess, cards, and gambling is the ability to simulate the future. Animals, which live largely in the present, are not as good at games as humans are, especially if they involve planning. Infant mammals do engage in a form of play, but this is more for exercise, testing one another, practicing future battles, and establishing the coming social pecking order rather than simulating the future.)

~ Michio Kaku

It's a mystery. A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

If, as some savants of consciousness suggest, we are actually agreeing to create, from moment to moment, everything we perceive as real, then it stands to reason that we're also responsible for keeping it going in some harmonious manner.

~ Phil Lesh

One of the major differences I see in the political climate today is that there is less collective support for coming to critical consciousness – in communities, in institutions, among friends.

~ Bell Hooks