Exploring the depths of consciousness can be an enlightening journey, offering insights into the mysteries of the mind and the nature of existence itself. Throughout history, philosophers, scientists, and thinkers have shared their profound thoughts on consciousness, seeking to understand its intricacies and significance. In this curated collection, we delve into 81 thought-provoking quotes that encapsulate the essence of consciousness. These quotes, drawn from a diverse array of sources, invite you to reflect, question, and deepen your understanding of the self and the universe around you. Whether you are a seeker of wisdom or simply curious, these insights offer a captivating window into the enigmatic realm of consciousness.
1. “Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.” - Kingsley Amis
2. “Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?” - Martin Luther King Jr.
3. “Consciousness is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.” - C.S. Lewis
4. “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
5. “Live simply. Deepest joy is like a flower....beautiful in essence.” - Tony Samara
6. “Intelligence is the capacity to know what we are doing and instinct is just instinct. The results are about the same.” - Will Cuppy
7. “Life before consciousness was like blank paper, so be it.” - Santosh Kalwar
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. “Every form is an image. Every image is a name. Every name is an attribute, every attribute a verb. Every verb forms the sentence to be read on Judgement Day, from the very Qur’aanulQariim that is found within the breastplate of all that is ‘created’ in the form of humankind. Every object be it animated or non-animated is an image!!” - AainaA-Ridtz A R
10. “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
11. “Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.” - Albert Camus
12. “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
13. “Moments of splendor and moments of gloom – they help maintain life’s balance. One thought is key: they all pass...” - Joan Marques
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. “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
16. “I see the mycelium as the Earth's natural Internet, a consciousness with which we might be able to communicate. Through cross-species interfacing, we may one day exchange information with these sentient cellular networks. Because these externalized neurological nets sense any impression upon them, from footsteps to falling tree branches, they could relay enormous amounts of data regarding the movements of all organisms through the landscape.” - Paul Stamets
17. “Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.” - Barbara Kingsolver
18. “Islaam is the Name of the Universe. Christ is the Soul, and Abraham, the Foundation — The Rainbow At Midnight” - AainaA-Ridtz A R
19. “Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.” - George Orwell
20. “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
21. “Consciousness, which is the "reflective" element of Norman's conceptual brain, handles the "higher" functions at the metaphorical tip of the very top of that complicated organ. Because consciousness pays a lot of attention to your thoughts, you tend to identify it with cognition. However, if you try to figure out exactly how you run your business or care for your family, you soon realize that you can't grasp that process just by thinking about it. As Norman puts it, "Consciousness also has a qualitative, sensory feel. If I say, 'I'm afraid,' it's not just my mind talking. My stomach also knots up.” - Winifred Gallagher
22. “The very comprehensibility of the world points to an intelligence behind the world. Indeed, science would be impossible if our intelligence were not adapted to the intelligibility of the world. The match between our intelligence and the intelligibility of the world is no accident. Nor can it properly be attributed to natural selection, which places a premium on survival and reproduction and has no stake in truth or conscious thought. Indeed, meat-puppet robots are just fine as the output of a Darwinian evolutionary process.” - William A. Dembski
23. “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
24. “Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.” - Siri Hustvedt
25. “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
26. “Be formless. As long as your "I" is asserted, it will be an idol of worship” - AainaA-Ridtz A R
27. “There are other beings live in between interval rhythms of our consciousness.” - Toba Beta
28. “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
29. “One part of my consciousness serves only one realm.” - Toba Beta
30. “To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is.” - C.G. Jung
31. “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
32. “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
33. “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
34. “When faced with a radical crisis, when the old way of being in the world, of interacting with each other and with the realm of nature doesn't work anymore, when survival is threatened by seemingly insurmountable problems, an individual life-form -- or a species -- will either die or become extinct or rise above the limitations of its condition through an evolutionary leap.” - Eckhart Tolle
35. “There are two paths of which one may choose in the walk of life; one we are born with, and the one we consciously blaze. One is naturally true, while the other is a perceptive illusion. Choose wisely at each fork in the road.” - T.F. Hodge
36. “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
37. “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
38. “We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself.” - Brian Cox
39. “There's no consciousness without senses and memories.” - Toba Beta
40. “How I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or better still, to none at all.” - Winfried Georg Sebald
41. “Thinking can only serve to measure out the helplessness of thought.” - H. Rider Haggard
42. “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
43. “The subject dropped, and we sat on in the dusk that was rapidly deepening into night. The door into the hall was open at our backs, and a panel of light from the lamps within was cast out to the terrace. Wandering moths, invisible in the darkness, suddenly became manifest as they fluttered into this illumination, and vanished again as they passed out of it. One moment they were there, living things with life and motion of their own, the next they quite disappeared. How inexplicable that would be, I thought, if one did not know from long familiarity, that light of the appropriate sort and strength is needed to make material objects visible. Philip must have been following precisely the same train of thought, for his voice broke in, carrying it a little further. 'Look at that moth,' he said, 'and even while you look it has gone like a ghost, even as like a ghost it appeared. Light made it visible. And there are other sorts of light, interior psychical light which similarly makes visible the beings which people the darkness of our blindness.' ("Expiation")” - E.F. Benson
44. “The collective consciousness of mankind defines the existence and sustainability of this civilization.” - Toba Beta
45. “In each of us there is another whom we do not know.(quoted in Incognito )” - C.G. Jung
46. “Aun cuando mi destino externo se haya desenvuelto como sucede para todos, inevitablemente y según lo decretado por los dioses, mi vida íntima es obra propiamente mía, con sus gozos y amarguras, y soy yo, en lo personal, el responsable de la misma.” - Herman Hesse
47. “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
48. “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
49. “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
50. “I am sitting under a sycamore by Tinker Creek. I am really here, alive on the intricate earth under trees. But under me, directly under the weight of my body on the grass, are other creatures, just as real, for whom also this moment, this tree, is “it”… in the top inch of soil, biologists found “an average of 1,356 living creatures in each square foot… I might as well include these creatures in this moment, as best as I can. My ignoring them won’t strip them of their reality, and admitting them, one by one, into my consciousness might heighten mine, might add their dim awareness to my human consciousness, such as it is, and set up a buzz, a vibration…Hasidism has a tradition that one of man’s purposes is to assist God in the work of “hallowing” the things of Creation. By a tremendous heave of the spirit, the devout man frees the divine sparks trapped in the mute things of time; he uplifts the forms and moments of creation, bearing them aloft into the rare air and hallowing fire in which all clays must shatter and burst.” - Annie Dillard
51. “What I aim to do is not so much learn the names of the shreds of creation that flourish in this valley, but to keep myself open to their meanings, which is to try to impress myself at all times with the fullest possible force of their very reality. I want to have things as multiply and intricately as possible present and visible in my mind. Then I might be able to sit on the hill by the burnt books where the starlings fly over, and see not only the starlings, the grass field, the quarried rock, the viney woods, Hollins pond, and the mountains beyond, but also, and simultaneously, feathers’ barbs, springtails in the soil, crystal in rock, chloroplasts streaming, rotifers pulsing, and the shape of the air in the pines. And, if I try to keep my eye on quantum physics, if I try to keep up with astronomy and cosmology, and really believe it all, I might ultimately be able to make out the landscape of the universe. Why not?” - Annie Dillard
52. “Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess, in deep black space high up among many white stars. My own consciousness had been disclosed to me, and I was happy. Then I saw far below me a long, curved band of color. As I came closer, I saw that it stretched endlessly in either direction, and I understood that I was seeing all the time of the planet where I had lived. It looked like a woman’s tweed scarf; the longer I studied any one spot, the more dots of color I saw. There was no end to the deepness and variety of the dots. At length, I started to look for my time, but, although more and more specks of color and deeper and more intricate textures appeared in the fabric, I couldn’t find my time, or any time at all that I recognized as being near my time. I couldn’t make out so much as a pyramid. Yet as I looked at the band of time, all the individual people, I understood with special clarity, were living at the very moment with great emotion, in intricate detail, in their individual times and places, and they were dying and being replaced by ever more people, one by one, like stitches in which whole worlds of feeling and energy were wrapped, in a never-ending cloth. I remembered suddenly the color and texture of our life as we knew it- these things had been utterly forgotten- and I thought as I searched for it on the limitless band, “that was a good time then, a good time to be living.”And I began to remember our time. I recalled green fields with carrots growing, one by one, in slender rows. Men and women in bright vests and scarves came and pulled the carrots out of the soil and carried them in baskets to shaded kitchens, where they scrubbed them with yellow brushes under running water…I saw may apples in forest, erupting through leaf-strewn paths. Cells on the root hairs of sycamores split and divided and apples grew striped and spotted in the fall. Mountains kept their cool caves, and squirrels raced home to their nests through sunlight and shade. I remembered the ocean, and I seemed to be in the ocean myself, swimming over orange crabs that looked like coral, or off the deep Atlantic banks where whitefish school. Or again I saw the tops of poplars, and the whole sky brushed with clouds in pallid streaks, under which wilds ducks flew, and called, one by one, and flew on. All these things I saw. Scenes grew in depth and sunlit detail before my eyes, and were replaced by ever more scenes, as I remembered the life of my time with increasing feeling. At last I saw the earth as a globe in space, and I recalled the ocean’s shape and the form of continents, saying to myself with surprise as I looked at the planet, “Yes, that’s how it was then, that part there we called ‘France’”. I was filled with the deep affection of nostalgia- and then I opened my eyes.” - Annie Dillard
53. “Superorganism. A biologist coined that word for our great African ant colonies, claiming that consciousness and intelligence resided not in the individual ant but in the collective ant mind. The trail of red taillights stretching to the horizon as day broke around us made me think of that term. Order and purpose must reside somewhere other than within each vehicle. That morning I heard the hum, the respiration of the superorganism. It's a sound the new immigrant hears but not for long. By the time I learned to say "6-inch Number 7 on rye with Swiss hold the lettuce," the sound, too, was gone. It became part of the what the mind would label silence. You were subsumed into the superorganism.” - Abraham Verghese
54. “We are beasts, you know, beasts risen from the savannas and jungles and forests. We have come down from the trees and up out of the water, but you can never, ever fully remove the feral nature from our psyches.” - Yasmine Galenorn
55. “I know noble accentsAnd lucid, inescapable rhythms;But I know, too,That the blackbird is involvedIn what I know.” - Wallace Stevens
56. “Soy incapaz de sentir interés en novelas que no causen desconcierto a los lectores. Esto no quiere decir que intente desconcertarles o escribir algo difícil. Lo que quiero decir es que las novelas largas que no hagan cuestionarse a los lectores el sentido de la historia, el flujo de su conciencia o la firmeza de la base de su existencia, no deben escribirse ni leerse. Yo tardo varios años en escribir una novela larga dejándome, literalmente, la piel en ello. Si no fuera capaz de escribir una novela con una fuerza como esa, la escritura no sería más que una pérdida de tiempo.” - Haruki Murakami
57. “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
58. “A mind is a simulation that simulates itself.” - Erol Ozan
59. “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
60. “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
61. “I begin to realize that my memory is a great catacomb, and that below my actual standing-ground there is layer after layer of historical ashes. Is the life of mind something like that of great trees of immemorial growth? Is the living layer of consciousness super-imposed upon hundreds of dead layers? Dead? No doubt this is too much to say, but still, when memory is slack the past becomes almost as though it had never been. To remember that we did know once is not a sign of possession but a sign of loss; it is like the number of an engraving which is no longer on its nail, the title of a volume no longer to be found on its shelf. My mind is the empty frame of a thousand vanished images.” - Henri Frédéric Amiel
62. “Death is a part of Life, they are dancing together the dance of infinity in front of the gates of Time. We can live our dreams as we are dreaming our future. Time is the Endless Consciousness” - Grigoris Deoudis
63. “The words we choose to use when we communicate with each other, carry vibrations. The word ‘war’ carries a whole different vibration than the word ‘peace’. The words we use are showing how we think and how we feel. The careful selection of words, helps to elevate our consciousness and resonate in higher frequencies.” - Grigoris Deoudis
64. “Consciousness provides the fertile ground where seeds of greatness are born.” - Gary Gordon
65. “After all, it isn't the facts of one's environment, but one's attitude toward them, that determines whether one will be defeated or victorious.” - David Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D.
66. “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
67. “I would rather be a conscious wrongdoer than a mindless saint.” - Habeeb Akande
68. “Coffee makes us severe, and grave and philosophical.” - Jonathan Swift
69. “A fish cannot be aware of the ocean, before jumping up out of water.” - Rixa White
70. “Consciousness is not about information but about its opposite: order. Consciousness is not a complex phenomenon; it is what consciousness is _about_ that is complex. It is presumably this fact that is the reason many scientists over the decades have tended to perceive information as something involving order and organization. Because consciousness is about an experience of order and organization. Because consciousness is a state that does not process much information - consciously. Consciousness consists of information no more than a person who consumes large amounts of food can be said to consist of food. Consciousness is nourished by information the same way the body is nourished by food. But human beings do not consist of hot dogs; they consist of hot dogs that have been eaten. Consciousness does not consist of hots dogs but consists of hot dogs that have been apprehended. That is far less complex.” - Tor Norretranders
71. “You can not hope to arrive at harmony in your life while stirring up disturbances in anothers...” - Rasheed Ogunlaru
72. “Peace of mind arrives the moment you come to peace with the contents of your mind.” - Rasheed Ogunlaru
73. “To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.” - Oliver Sacks
74. “Theere is an imperative to be in a process, the energy & consciousness of life means for us to be constantly observing, learning & becoming.” - jay woodman
75. “An enlightened person raises the level of the consciousness of the entire community.” - Phyllis Theroux
76. “I believe in the power of love, and planting positive thought seeds into the collective consciousness.” - jay woodman
77. “We can only save ourselves through elevating our individual consciousness, by realizing there is already completeness within, and exercising as much considerate independence, respect and fairness as is possible.” - Bryant McGill
78. “When our focus is toward a principle of relatedness and oneness, and away from fragmentation and isolation, health ensues” - Larry Dossey
79. “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
80. “There is a self-destructive program running in the consciousness of humanity, and we must write a new program.” - Bryant McGill
81. “Become a good noticer. Pay attention to the feelings, hunches, and intuitions that flood your life each day. If you do, you will see that premonitions are not rare, but a natural part of our lives.” - Larry Dossey
