Consciousness Quotes - Page 37

• Now that our sexual experience is increasingly available to us as a subject for contemplation, we have to extend our language to express our new consciousness until we have as many words for sexuality as the Eskimo has for snow, that pervasive, beautiful, and mortal climate in which we all live.

  Jane Rule

  Beautiful, Sex, Snow

  Jane Rule (1981). “Outlander”, Tallahassee, Fla. : Naiad Press

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• ... the place we assign to pornography depends on the goals we set for our own consciousness, our own experience.

  Susan Sontag

  Goal, Pornography, Depends

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• The feeling of an unbridgeable gulf between consciousness and brain-process:When does this feeling occur in the present case?It is when I (for example) turn my attention in a particular way on to my own consciousness, and, astonished, say to myself: THIS is supposed to be produced by a process in the brain!--as it were clutching my forehead.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Self, Feelings, Brain

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• Western man represents himself, on the political or psychological stage, in a spectacular world-theater. Our personality is innately cinematic, light-charged projections flickering on the screen of Western consciousness.

  Camille Paglia

  Men, Light, Personality

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays”, p.99, Vintage

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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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• One connection I see between novelists and terrorists is that we both attempt to alter consciousness.

  Don DeLillo

  Novelists, Connections, Terrorist

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• What, then, is the basic difference between today's computer and an intelligent being? It is that the computer can be made to seebut not to perceive. What matters here is not that the computer is without consciousness but that thus far it is incapable of the spontaneous grasp of pattern--a capacity essential to perception and intelligence.

  Rudolf Arnheim

  Intelligent, What Matters, Differences

  Rudolf Arnheim (2004). “Visual Thinking”, p.73, Univ of California Press

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• But, in history, practical usefulness never determines the moral value of an achievement. Only the person who increases the knowledge humanity has about itself and enhances its creative consciousness permanently enriches humanity.

  Stefan Zweig

  Knowledge, Achievement, Creative

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• The enormous social change involved in a sexual revolution is basically a matter of altered consciousness, the exposure and elimination of social and psychological realities underlying political and cultural structures. We are speaking, then, of a cultural revolution, which, while it must necessarily involve the political and economic reorganization traditionally implied by the term revolution, must go far beyond this as well.

  Kate Millett

  Women, Reality, Political

  Kate Millett (2016). “Sexual Politics”, p.362, Columbia University Press

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• At one of the largest advertising agencies in America psychologists on the staff are probing sample humans in an attempt to find how to identify, and beam messages to, people of high anxiety, body consciousness, hostility, passiveness, and so on.

  Vance Packard

  America, Agency, People

  Vance Packard (1991). “The Hidden Persuaders”

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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, States, Organisms

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

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• Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed.

  Thomas Nagel

  Analysis, Problem, Program

  Thomas Nagel (2012). “Mortal Questions”, p.167, Cambridge University Press

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• every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view.

  Thomas Nagel

  Views, Subjectivity, Theory

  Thomas Nagel (2012). “Mortal Questions”, p.167, Cambridge University Press

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• It is important to note that multiculturalism does not share the postmodernist stance. Its passions are political; its assumptionsempirical; its conception of identities visceral. For it, there is no doubting that history is something that happened and that those happenings have left their mark within our collective consciousness. History for multiculturalists is not a succession of dissolving texts, but a tense tangle of past actions that have reshaped the landscape, distributed the nation's wealth, established boundaries, engendered prejudices, and unleashed energies.

  Joyce Appleby

  Passion, Past, Diversity

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• The insidiousness of science lies in its claim to be not a subject, but a method. You could ignore a subject; no subject is all-inclusive. But a method can plausibly be applied to anything within the field of consciousness.

  Katharine Fullerton Gerould

  Lying, Science, Fields

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• When the epistemologists' concept of consciousness first became popular, it seems to have been in part a transformed application of the Protestant notion of conscience."Consciousness" was imported to play in the mental world the role played by light in the mechanical world.

  Gilbert Ryle

  Play, Light, Firsts

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• ... my today's self perpetually slips out of any hold of it that I may try to take.

  Gilbert Ryle

  Self, Trying, May

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• There might have been a hundred or a thousand life-bearing planets, had the course of evolution of the universe been a little different, or there might have been none at all. They would probably add, that, as life and man have been produced, that shows that their production was possible; and therefore, if not now then at some other time, if not here then in some other planet of some other sun, we should be sure to have come into existence; or if not precisely the same as we are, then something a little better or a little worse.

  Alfred Russel Wallace

  Believe, Men, Body

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• The line that I am urging as today's conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, arepudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities of the body. Mental states and events are a special subclass of the states and events of the human or animal body.

  Willard Van Orman Quine

  Animal, Mind, Special

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• I think that there is an infinite creative force that generates all consciousness and all matter and we are all connected and if you align yourself with this infinite creative force then you can be positive and you can be beautiful, I don't think its a person or god, I don't believe in any particular doctrine or dogma, only that humanity is connected.

  Russell Brand

  Beautiful, Believe, Thinking

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  The only Revolution that can really change the world is the one in your own consciousness, and mine has already begun.

  Russell Brand

  World, Revolution, Mines

  Russell Brand (2014). “Revolution”, p.21, Ballantine Books

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• Consciousness exists beyond your head, between our heads, and it can manifest harmony.

  Russell Brand

  Harmony, Manifest

  Russell Brand (2014). “Revolution”, p.114, Ballantine Books

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• A spirituality that is only private and self-absorbed, one devoid of an authentic political and social consciousness, does little to halt the suicidal juggernaut of history. On the other hand, an activism that is not purified by profound spiritual and psychological self-awareness ... will only perpetuate the problem it is trying to solve, however righteous its intentions.

  Andrew Harvey

  Spiritual, Suicidal, Self

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• The great Initiates in the spirit world have vast and imposing plans for the musical future. What is this plan? It is to use music as an occult medium through which to develop altered states of consciousness, psychic abilities, and contact with the spirit world. Music in the future is to be used to bring people into yet closer touch with the devils; they will be enabled to partake of the beneficial influence of these beings while attending concerts at which by the appropriate type of sound they have been invoked.

  John Todd

  Psychics, People, Musical

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• The Marxist combination of materialism and determinism is fatally anti-humanistic. It denies a consciousness, a mind, that is independent of material conditions and class relations. It denies a will and volition that are capable of shaping the course of history. It denies an individuality that is not reducible to class. It denies both the idea and the reality of freedom, a freedom that is something more than the "bourgeois" freedom to buy and sell. It denies a morality that transcends class interests. And it denies the spirituality of man.

  Gertrude Himmelfarb

  Freedom, Independent, Reality

  Gertrude Himmelfarb (1995). “On Looking Into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society”, Vintage

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