Conscious Quotes - Page 25

• Knowledge has two extremes. The first is the pure natural ignorance in which all men find themselves at birth. The other extreme is that reached by great minds, who, having run through all that men can know, find they know nothing, and come back again to that same natural ignorance from which they set out; this is a learned ignorance which is conscious of itself.

  Blaise Pascal

  Running, Ignorance, Knowledge

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• I'm really conscious of the amount of food I eat, but I don't deny myself anything. For example, I have a really big sweet tooth. At the end of the night, if I'm craving ice cream, I might not have the bowl that I would have when I was a kid, but I'll put a couple of scoops in a coffee mug, and I'll eat it slowly, and I enjoy every moment of it.

  Summer Sanders

  Sweet, Couple, Coffee

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• The animal is one with its life activity. It does not distinguish the activity from itself. It is its activity. But man makes hislife activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has a conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he is completely identified.

  Karl Marx

  Determination, Animal, Men

  Erich Fromm, Karl Marx (2013). “Marx's Concept of Man: Including 'Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts'”, p.87, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• But it isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of very emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it's a half- love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.

  Doris Lessing

  Power, People, Dying

  Doris May Lessing (1994). “The Golden Notebook”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• all the categories which we employ to describe conscious mental acts, such as ideas, purposes, resolutions, and so on, can be applied tothese latent states.

  Sigmund Freud

  Ideas, Purpose, Consciousness

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• People are less self-conscious in the intimacy of family life and during the anxiety of a great sorrow. The dazzling varnish of anextreme politeness is then less in evidence, and the true qualities of the heart regain their proper proportions.

  Stendhal

  Family, Heart, Self

  Stendhal (1986). “Armance”, Dufour Editions

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• Tis going, I own, like the Knight of the Woeful Countenance, in quest of melancholy adventures--but I know not how it is, but I am never so perfectly conscious of the existence of a soul within me, as when I am entangled in them.

  Laurence Sterne

  Adventure, Knights, Soul

  Laurence Sterne, Melvyn New, Geoffrey Day (2006). “A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy: And, Continuation of the Bramine's Journal : with Related Texts”, p.156, Hackett Publishing

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• I want you to consider this distinction as you go forward in life. Being male is not enough; being a man is a right to be earned and an honor to be cherished. I cannot tell you how to earn that right or deserve that honor. . . but I can tell you that the formation of your manhood must be a conscious act governed by the highest vision of the man you want to be.

  Kent Nerburn

  Men, Forward In Life, Honor

  Kent Nerburn (2014). “Letters to My Son: A Father's Wisdom on Manhood, Life, and Love”, p.36, New World Library

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• My father so appropriately put it that we are certainly the only animal that makes conscious choices that are bad for our survival as a species.

  Louise Leakey

  Father, Animal, Choices

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• That all may be so, but when I begin to exercise that power I am not conscious of the power, but only of the limitations imposed on me.

  William Howard Taft

  Exercise, Power, May

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• Quite apart from any conscious program, the great cultural historians have always been historical morphologists: seekers after theforms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art.

  Johan Huizinga

  Art, History, Historical

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• Maturity involves being honest and true to oneself, making decisions based on a conscious internal process, assuming responsibility for one's decisions, having healthy relationships with others and developing one's own true gifts. It involves thinking about one's environment and deciding what one will and won't accept.

  Mary Pipher

  Responsibility, Thinking, Maturity

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• Adolescents' immature thinking makes it difficult for them to process the divorce. They tend to see things in black-and-white terms and have trouble putting events into perspective. They are absolute in their judgments and expect perfection in parents. They are likely to be self-conscious about their parent's failures and critical of their every move. They have the expectations that parents will keep them safe and happy and are shocked by the broken covenant. Adolescents are unforgiving.

  Mary Pipher

  Moving, Divorce, Black And White

  Mary Pipher (2005). “Reviving Ophelia”, p.120, Penguin

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• How often must I repeat, that I know or am conscious of my own being; and that I myself am not my ideas, but somewhat else, a thinking, active principle that perceives, knows, wills, and operates about ideas?

  George Berkeley

  Thinking, Ideas, Perception

  George Berkeley (1837). “Works: Account of His Life and Letters”, p.69

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• There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious. We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice or good-will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us.

  David Hume

  Hurt, Army, Moon

  David Hume (1957). “The Natural History of Religion”, p.29, Stanford University Press

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• We are still barely conscious of how harmful it is to treat children in a degrading manner. Treating them with respect and recognizing the consequences of their being humiliated are by no means intellectual matters; otherwise, their importance would long since have been generally recognized.

  Alice Miller

  Children, Mean, Long

  Alice Miller (2002). “For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence”, p.177, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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• The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred million to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face? We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Sleep, Men, Expectations

  Henry David Thoreau (1882). “Walden”, p.142

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• In the field of marketing . . . the trend toward selling [has] reached something of a nadir with the unveiling . . . of so-called subliminal projection. That is the technique designed to flash messages past our conscious guard.

  Vance Packard

  Past, Marketing, Technique

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• fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism--something it is like for the organism.

  Thomas Nagel

  Ifs And, Consciousness, States

  Thomas Nagel (2012). “Mortal Questions”, p.166, Cambridge University Press

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• Methods and conclusions formed by half the race only, must necessarily require revision as the other half of humanity rises into conscious responsibility.

  Elizabeth Blackwell

  Responsibility, Race, Humanity

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• The only thing I can definitely say is that you cease to be self-conscious after you've had to kiss somebody on-camera with 30 people watching.

  Anna Paquin

  Kissing, Self, People

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• Here is the mistake of the cut-and-dried man of culture. He goes about with the secret of having learned to appreciate the "grandstyle." He has lived in Homer till he can recall the roll of that many-sounding sea. He has pored over the lofty and pictorial thought of Plato till he begins to pique himself upon its grandeur. His fancy has been fed on the quaint old-world genius of Herodotus, his judgment on the melancholy wisdom of Tacitus and the complacent cynicism of Gibbon--and of all this he is conscious and proud.

  Richard Holt Hutton

  Plato, Mistake, Cutting

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• ... we become so accustomed to meet with injustice, and, if we are at all sincere with our own hearts, are so conscious of being guity of it ourselves, that we learn to look upon it almost as a necessity.

  Elizabeth Missing Sewell

  Heart, Looks, Injustice

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• Whenever a conscious Black woman raises her voice on issues central to her existence, somebody is going to call her strident, because they don't want to hear about it, nor us. I refuse to be silenced and I refuse to be trivialized, even if I do not say what I have to say perfectly.

  Audre Lorde

  Voice, Issues, Black

  Audre Lorde, Joan Wylie Hall (2004). “Conversations with Audre Lorde”, p.197, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• It is my conviction that in general women are more snobbish and class conscious than men and that these ignoble traits are a product of men's attitude toward women and women's passive acceptance of this attitude.

  Mary Barnett Gilson

  Attitude, Women, Acceptance

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