58 Consciousness Quotes To Ponder

In today's fast-paced world, taking a moment to reflect on the nature of consciousness can offer profound insights and a sense of peace. Whether you're seeking a spark of inspiration, a shift in perspective, or a deeper understanding of the human experience, quotes about consciousness can serve as guiding lights. We've meticulously curated a collection of the top 58 consciousness quotes, each one chosen for its ability to provoke thought and stir the soul. Join us as we delve into these powerful words, shedding light on the intricate and fascinating world of consciousness.

1. “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

2. “Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?” - Martin Luther King Jr.

3. “...I sense that stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet momentous coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental.” - Antonio Damasio

4. “Consciousness is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.” - C.S. Lewis

5. “The WakingI wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.I learn by going where I have to go.We think by feeling. What is there to know?I hear my being dance from ear to ear.I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.Of those so close beside me, which are you?God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,And learn by going where I have to go.Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.Great Nature has another thing to doTo you and me, so take the lively air,And, lovely, learn by going where to go.This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.What falls away is always. And is near.I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.I learn by going where I have to go.” - Theodore Roethke

6. “His brain and his heart knew this, but he couldn’t stop himself, and the razor of his conscience lent the undeniable thrill of pain to the act.” - Robert Girardi

7. “True philosophy must start from the most immediate and comprehensive fact of consciousness: 'I am life that wants to live, in the midst of life that wants to live” - Albert Schweitzer

8. “A positive needs a negative to complete its cycle, as the Moon needs an embodiment of itself, the Sun, to complete the cycle of its illusory essence, the Earth. Now if the earth is in dire straits, is bombing the moon to discover whether water is ‘perceived’ in the natural stance of humans an intelligent move?” - AainaA-Ridtz A R

9. “Find the Key ! Find the Key ! If you want to open the Doors of Heaven ! Without which, you can at best, look from outside, like the pauper looking in through the window at your food when hungry. Find the Key !” - AainaA-Ridtz A R

10. “To duplicate meanings is to isolate the consciousness.” - Floriano Martins

11. “Like any organic entity, a system of consciousness manifests itself through the orderly, differentiated development of a certain unifying reality.” - Kitaro Nishida

12. “We have learnt that the exploration of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for penetrating. Feeling that there must be more behind, we return to our starting point in human consciousness - the one centre where more might become known. There we find other stirrings, other revelations than those conditioned by the world of symbols... Physics most strongly insists that its methods do not penetrate behind the symbolism. Surely then that mental and spiritual nature of ourselves, known in our minds by an intimate contact transcending the methods of physics, supplies just that... which science is admittedly unable to give.” - Arthur Stanley Eddington

13. “Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.” - Erwin Schrödinger

14. “You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.” - Terence McKenna

15. “I’ve come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, or tasks. It happens sometimes when you are lost in a hard challenge, or when an artist or a craftsman becomes one with the brush or the tool. It happens sometimes while you’re playing sports, or listening to music or lost in a story, or to some people when they feel enveloped by God’s love. And it happens most when we connect with other people. I’ve come to think that happiness isn’t really produced by conscious accomplishments. Happiness is a measure of how thickly the unconscious parts of our minds are intertwined with other people and with activities. Happiness is determined by how much information and affection flows through us covertly every day and year.” - David Brooks

16. “Once out of your cradle, you don't focus on the world in the abstract, perceiving things for the first time, but in synchrony with your accumulated knowledge, which enriches and helps define your experience, as well as ensuring its uniqueness.” - Winifred Gallagher

17. “The moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is strictly speaking no longer the ego, but just an old, conditioned mind-pattern. Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist.” - Eckhart Tolle

18. “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” - William James

19. “The only reality we can ever truly know is that of our perceptions, our own consciousness, while that consciousness, and thus our entire reality, is made of nothing but signs and symbols. Nothing but language.Even God requires language before conceiving the Universe. See Genesis: “In the beginning was the Word.” - Alan Moore

20. “Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.” - Voltaire

21. “There are other beings live in between interval rhythms of our consciousness.” - Toba Beta

22. “One part of my consciousness serves only one realm.” - Toba Beta

23. “Don't seek love externally, it's fleeting. Go beyond the ego and awaken thelove that already exists within; it will encompass everyone andeverything in your life; it will permeate your very being.” - Danielle Pierre

24. “Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.” - Aldous Huxley

25. “We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60's. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.” - Hunter S. Thompson

26. “To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.” - James P. Carse

27. “It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy.” - Terence McKenna

28. “It may be that DMT makes us able to perceive what the physicist call "dark matter" - the 95 per cent of the universe's mass that is known to exist but that at present remains invisible to our senses and instruments.” - Graham Hancock

29. “There's no consciousness without senses and memories.” - Toba Beta

30. “As a spirit having a human experience, you can choose to not merely exist but to be fully conscious and aware of living in a limited world. When you take a conscious part in life and its multitudes of choices, you won't let life happen to you - you will make life happen for you.” - James Van Praagh

31. “Consciousness ain't slower than a blink of an eye.” - Toba Beta

32. “Order and reason, beauty and benevolence, are characteristics and conceptions which we find solely associated with the mind of man.” - Karl Pearson

33. “In each of us there is another whom we do not know.(quoted in Incognito )” - C.G. Jung

34. “I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness- a real thorough-going illness.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky

35. “And it's a disquieting thought that not even the past is done with, even that continues to change, as if in reality there is only one time, for everything, one time for every purpose under heaven. One single second, one single landscape, in which what happens activates and deactivates what has already happened in endless chain reactions, like the processes that take place in the brain, perhaps, where cells suddenly bloom and die away, all according to the way the winds of consciousness are blowing.” - Karl Ove Knausgård

36. “The desire to live life to its fullest, to acquire more knowledge, to abandon the economic treadmill, are all typical reactions to these experiences in altered states of consciousness. The previous fear of death is typically quelled. If the individual generally remains thereafter in the existential state of awareness, the deep internal feeling of eternity is quite profound and unshakable.” - Edgar Mitchell

37. “Strange, how a moment of existence can cut so deeply into our being that while ages pass unnoticed, a brief love can structure and define the very topology of our consciousness ever after.” - Steven L. Peck

38. “... the most important concept ever put forth was that matter, ALL matter, with no exceptions from stone to star to starfish to student to sovereign, is as divine as all else in the cosmos, for all flows from Consciousness, the Word that came before the World - and all, in time, will flow back.” - Ki Longfellow

39. “Negarse a que el acto delicado de girar el picaporte, ese acto por el cual todo podría transformarse, se cumpla con la fría eficacia de un reflejo cotidiano.” - Julio Cortazar

40. “People can not be separated from their environment. Living consciousness is not an isolated unit. Human consciousness is increasing the order of the rest of the world and has an incredible power to heal ourselves and the world: in a certain sense we make the world as such, as we wish.” - Lynne McTaggart

41. “What folly takes light through ether to each eye from every horizon.” - Scarlett Thomas

42. “When your heart's gratitude comes to the fore, when you become all gratitude, this gratitude is like a flow, a flow of consciousness. When your consciousness is flowing, feel that this gratitude-flow is like a river that is watering the root of the tree and the tree itself. It is always through gratitude that your consciousness-river will grow and water the perfection-tree inside you.” - Sri Chinmoy

43. “Real joy means immediate expansion. If we experience pure joy, immediately our heart expands. We feel that we are flying in the divine freedom-sky. The entire length and breadth of the world becomes ours, not for us to rule over, but as an expansion of our consciousness. We become reality and vastness.” - Sri Chinmoy

44. “Now I can broach the notion of suicide. It has already been felt what solution might be given. At this point the problem is reversed. It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning. Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully. Now, no one will live this fate, knowing it to be absurd, unless he does everything to keep before him that absurd brought to light by consciousness.” - Albert Camus

45. “Consciousness provides the fertile ground where seeds of greatness are born.” - Gary Gordon

46. “Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence.” - Ayn Rand

47. “Perceptual fields are limited by the attractor patterns that they're associated with. This means that the capacity to recognize significant factors in a given situation is limited by the context that arises from the level of consciousness of the observer. The motive of the viewer automatically determines what is seen; causality is, therefore, ascribed to factors that are, in fact, a function of the biases of the observer and aren't at all instrumental in the situation itself.” - David Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D.

48. “A consciência da insonsciência da vida é o mais antigo imposto à inteligência.” - Fernando Pessoa

49. “Human kind gradually begins to remove the blinders from their consciousness about life, about what is real and what is not. Intuition and psychic abilities increase.” - Elaine Seiler

50. “From the Absolute to the Relative-from the Infinite to the Finite-from the Undifferentiated to the Differentiated-from the Unconditioned to the Conditioned and again from the Relative to the Absolute. That is the whole truth of the inexistance to the existentialist, formless to the form, Creator to the Creature, one to the every being, absolute to the inabsolute and vis-á-vis, soforth every single thing is temporary, non-existed, so do I, the dream that I dreamed off is simply a 'lie and impermanent too' same as in the mortal world whatever I do experience.” - Upanishad

51. “The world is already yours - why try to conquer it?” - Rasheed Ogunlaru

52. “A fish cannot be aware of the ocean, before jumping up out of water.” - Rixa White

53. “We are basically all one. We are one being, one consciousness, one whole. We are all connected to each other. We are all parts of the same whole. How we treat others are how we treat ourselves. If we treat others badly, we are really treating ourselves badly. If we hate others, we are really hating ourselves. If we love others, we are basically loving ourselves.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

54. “Peace of mind arrives the moment you come to peace with the contents of your mind.” - Rasheed Ogunlaru

55. “What if the differences between social strata stem not from genomics or inherent xcellence or even dollars, but merely differences in knowledge? Would this not mean the whole Pyramid is built on shifting sands?" I speculated such a suggestion could be seen as a serious deviancy. Melphi seemed delited. "Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' consciences; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding up the mirror." I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves. Melphi relplied, "History suggests, not until they are made to.” - David Mitchell

56. “He was following the Earth through its days, drifting with the rhythms of its myriad pulses, seeping through the webs of its life, swelling with its tides, turning with its weight.” - Douglas Adams

57. “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

58. “Going beyond our ordinary concept of self is what always brings us the greatest sense of joy in life. Going beyond our own boundaries brings us an ecstatic awareness of how we are truly created in connection with all that is.” - Cynthia Sue Larson