68 Consciousness Quotes

In the intricate tapestry of human existence, consciousness often stands as one of the most profound and perplexing threads. It’s the essence of our awareness, the foundation of our thoughts, and the driving force behind our perceptions. Exploring the depths of consciousness can be both an enlightening and transformative journey. To help illuminate this path, we’ve curated a collection of the top 68 consciousness quotes. These words of wisdom from renowned philosophers, scientists, poets, and thinkers aim to inspire, provoke contemplation, and deepen your understanding of this enigmatic aspect of life. Dive in and let these reflections spark your own exploration into the nature of awareness and the universe within.

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. “...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

3. “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

4. “Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.” - Sigmund Freud

5. “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

6. “But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.” - Audre Lorde

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

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

9. “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

10. “Don't talk of Life as if its one big package of miseries - it is the very Essence within that passes through both you, and your enemies and every permissible illusion. Once you're opened to, and are awakened to your TRUE NATURE, fireworks light up your path, irrespective whether it is a "Tariqa", or a pathless one!” - AainaA-Ridtz A R

11. “How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves - our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding.” - Andrew Sean Greer

12. “Which natural gift would you most like to possess? The ability to master other languages (which would have hugely enhanced the scope of these answers).How would you like to die? Fully conscious, and either fighting or reciting (or fooling around).What do you most dislike about your appearance? The way in which it makes former admirers search for neutral words.” - Christopher Hitchens

13. “Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.” - Barbara Kingsolver

14. “A veiled Mind is more enticing than all the nude men lining up the Seine, during Summer.” - AainaA-Ridtz A R

15. “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

16. “A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds...this is all great stuff. Wonderful stuff. You can argue it interminably. But it can't be contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these topics.” - Michael Crichton

17. “Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.” - Siri Hustvedt

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

19. “When once the Heart is awakened, every single moment 'in-time' is a treasure to beheld” - AainaA-Ridtz A R

20. “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 A R

21. “Be formless. As long as your "I" is asserted, it will be an idol of worship” - AainaA-Ridtz A R

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

23. “Make peace with silence, and remind yourself that it is in this space that you'll come to remember your spirit. When you're able to transcend an aversion to silence, you'll also transcend many other miseries. And it is in this silence that the remembrance of God will be activated.” - Wayne W. Dyer

24. “There is a kind of sleep that steals upon us sometimes, which, while it holds the body prisoner, does not free the mind from a sense of things about it, and enable it to ramble at its pleasure. So far as an overpowering heaviness, a prostration of strength, and an utter inability to control our thoughts or power of motion, can be called sleep, this is it; and yet we have a consciousness of all that is going on about us; and if we dream at such a time, words which are really spoken, or sounds which really exist at the moment, accommodate themselves with surprising readiness to our visions, until reality and imagination become so strangely blended that it is afterwards almost a matter of impossibilty to separate the two. Nor is this, the most striking phenomenon, incidental to such a state. It is an undoubted fact, that although our senses of touch and sight be for the time dead, yet our sleeping thoughts, and the visionary scenes that pass before us, will be influenced, and materially influenced, by the mere silent presence of some external object: which may not have been near us when we closed our eyes: and of whose vicinity we have had no waking consciousness. ” - Charles Dickens

25. “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

26. “The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines.” - Hilary Mantel

27. “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

28. “Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.” - Peter Watts

29. “As a fact, we cannot give suffering precedence in either our individual or collective lives. We have to get on with things, and those who give precedence to suffering will be left behind. They fetter us with their sniveling. We have someplace to go and must believe we can get there, wherever that may be. And to conceive that there is a 'brotherhood of suffering between everything alive' would disable us from getting anywhere. We are preoccupied with the good life, and step by step are working toward a better life. What we do, as a conscious species, is set markers for ourselves. Once we reach one marker, we advance to the next — as if we were playing a board game we think will never end, despite the fact that it will, like it or not. And if you are too conscious of not liking it, then you may conceive of yourself as a biological paradox that cannot live with its consciousness and cannot live without it. And in so living and not living, you take your place with the undead and the human puppet.” - Thomas Ligotti

30. “We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.” - Terence McKenna

31. “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

32. “Dreams are rough copies of the waking soul Yet uncorrected of the higher will, So that men sometimes in their dreams confessAn unsuspected, or forgotten, self; -Since Dreaming, Madness, Passion, are akinIn missing each that salutory reinOf reason, and the grinding will of man.” - Pedro Calderón de la Barca

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

34. “Do not only think about it, but feel about it, also, before taking appropriate action.” - T.F. Hodge

35. “Seemingly minor yet persistent things penetrate the mind over time making it difficult to ever realize the impact; hence, though quite unfortunate, the most dangerous forms of corruption are those that are subtle and below the radar.” - Criss Jami

36. “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

37. “(there is) no other means of escaping from one's consciousness than to deny it, to look upon it as an organic disease of the terrestrial intelligence - a disease which we must endeavor to cure by an action which must appear to us an action of violent and willful madness, but which, on the other side of our appearances, is probably an action of health. ("Of Immortality")” - Maurice Maeterlinck

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

39. “We have a closed circle of consistency here: the laws of physics produce complex systems, and these complex systems lead to consciousness, which then produces mathematics, which can then encode in a succinct and inspiring way the very underlying laws of physics that gave rise to it.” - Roger Penrose

40. “How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos? Especially awe inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago. These particles drifted for eons and light-years until gravity and change brought them together here, now. These atoms now form a conglomerate- your brain- that can not only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to wonder. With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, it the greatest mystery of all.” - V.S. Ramachandran

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

42. “It is when one begins to lose the consciousness of freedom, and when the idea of necessity enters the world at all, when there is any hurry or strain anywhere, a letter to be written or a train to catch, when you have got to work, to make the horses of the dream gallop, or to make the rifles go off, that the dream is declining, and turning into the nightmare, which belongs to the poorest and most vulgar class of dreams.” - Karen Blixen

43. “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

44. “The tree was so old, and stood there so alone, that his childish heart had been filled with compassion; if no one else on the farm gave it a thought, he would at least do his best to, even though he suspected that his child's words and child's deeds didn't make much difference. It had stood there before he was born, and would be standing there after he was dead, but perhaps, even so, it was pleased that he stroked its bark every time he passed, and sometimes, when he was sure he wasn't observed, even pressed his cheek against it.” - Karl Ove Knausgård

45. “The myth of quantum consciousness sits well with many whose egos have made it impossible for them to accept the insignificant place science perceives for humanity, as modern instruments probe the farthest reaches of space and time. ... quantum consciousness has about as much substance as the aether from which it is composed. Early in this century, quantum mechanics and Einstein’s relativity destroyed the notion of a holistic universe that had seemed within the realm of possibility in the century just past. First, Einstein did away with the aether, shattering the doctrine that we all move about inside a universal, cosmic fluid whose excitations connect us simultaneously to one another and to the rest of the universe. Second, Einstein and other physicists proved that matter and light were composed of particles, wiping away the notion of universal continuity. Atomic theory and quantum mechanics demonstrated that everything, even space and time, exists in discrete bits – quanta. To turn this around and say that twentieth century physics initiated some new holistic view of the universe is a complete misrepresentation of what actually took place. ... The myth of quantum consciousness should take its place along with gods, unicorns, and dragons as yet another product of the fantasies of people unwilling to accept what science, reason, and their own eyes tell them about the world.” - Victor J. Stenger

46. “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” - Carl Jung

47. “Whether consciousness is implanted in us by something divine, or whether it is created by the efforts of our brains, the end result is the same. We are.” - Neal Shusterman

48. “La lassitude est la fin des actes d'une vie machinale, mais elle inaugure en même temps le mouvement de la conscience. Elle l'éveille et elle provoque la suite. La suite, c'est le retour inconscient dans la chaîne, ou c'est l'éveil définitif. Au bout de l'éveil vient avec le temps, la conséquence: suicide ou rétablissement.” - Albert Camus

49. “Immortal existence..Sometimes Living is not such an easy task..Being here or there..The spirit is the same.. Only changes the place where shows..Here, the make-up is of meat.. There is infinite LIGHT..In the flesh, or out of it , what does order is what thinks and what creates..Each thought, a vibration..Each action, a reaction..That doesn't change with the death of the body.. Because actually nobody dies..We are immortal divine existences.. Believing or not..So many lives.. So many experiences..So many faces.. So many dreams..To each life new opportunities.. New learnings..The soul Request.. Thirsty to experiment, feels, develop, evolve, grow and so it goes..The spirit Obeys.. Enters and exit the perishable bodies..Gets right and misses.. rehearses, Conquers and proceeds..The spirit is a gift of the architect of the universe for the benefit of all..It's light.. it's love.. it's eternal..In the Astral or in the Earth.. There is to educate the thought and to clean the energies around yourself..Gives some work to do that spiritual maintenance, but it is worthwhile.It is Light that cleans the Light!So never forget you are imperishable consciousness..May a light circle involves and illuminate each soul..Much light and love in each heart that pulses in the heart of the whole..Namaste,Dave” - Dave Zebian

50. “The only way to follow your path is to take the lead.” - Joe Peterson

51. “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

52. “If you always attach positive emotions to the things you want, and never attach negative emotions to the things you don't, then that which you desire most will invariably come your way.” - Matt D. Miller

53. “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

54. “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.

55. “The here and the beyond are enough, but there were a few angels for whom it was not enough: who demanded a third dimension--who sought fusions, communes, who ate each other and created sex.” - Dale Pendell

56. “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

57. “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

58. “His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

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

61. “Meditation expands our inner being. The inner being is like a small, individual river flowering towards the Ocean. In meditation, I feel how my inner being expands into an inner ocean, which is part of everything, which is one with Existence. Through the inner being, we come in contact with the inner ocean, the undefined and boundless within ourselves, where we are one with life. We realize that God is part of life. We realize that God is not a person, but the consciousness that is part of everything. We find God in a flower, in a tree, in the eyes of a child or in a playful dog. Through discovering our inner being, we discover that we are also part of the flower, the child or the dog. We realize that God is everywhere.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

62. “When we develop the heart chakra, we begin to influence the surroundings with our spiritual presence. When we develop the communication chakra, we begin to influence the country with our spiritual presence. When we develop the seventh chakra, we begin to influence the world with our spiritual presence without doing anything.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

63. “When we embrace the opposites within ourselves and understand that inner harmony arises when they mature, we find the love, joy, silence and freedom that are hidden in every moment. It is my experience that it is through the inner female side that we find the depth within ourselves – independent of if we are a man or a woman. It is through the female side that we find the inner source of love and truth. It is through the female side that we lit the light of our own consciousness. The more we learn to know the inner man and woman and the more we accept their different visions of life, the more a meeting happens between them that makes us happy and satisfied. Through embracing both these sides in ourselves, we realize that we really lack nothing – but that we already are love. When both the male and female side is capable of living in trust, a love begins to flow between them – a love that was always possible, but not realized. The inner woman is the meditative quality within ourselves. The inner woman is the source of love and truth. The inner woman is the capacity to surrender to life. It is through the inner woman that we are in contact with life. It is the inner woman that is the door to belongingness with the Whole.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

64. “The war consciousness is purposely cultivated to guide the male away from the natural, healthy balances between masculine and feminine energies, and toward more unbalanced and detached psychologies.” - Bryant McGill

65. “There is nothing like fear to complicate one's consciousness, inducing previously unknown levels of reflection” - Thomas Ligotti

66. “Our relatedness with other living forms provides us something we sorely need: a reverence for the life of all creatures great and small, and an expanded view of our place in nature–not as rulers over it, but as participants in it.” - Larry Dossey

67. “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

68. “The greatest crimes in the world are not committed against the body, but against the freedom of the consciousness.” - Bryant McGill