"I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."
— Wayne W. Dyer

"Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery. A mystery is a phenomenon that people don't know how to think about - yet. There have been other great mysteries: the mystery of the origin of the universe, the mystery of life and reproduction, the mystery of the design to be found in nature, the mysteries of time, space, and gravity. These were not just areas of scientific ignorance, but of utter bafflement and wonder. We do not yet have all the answers to any of the questions of cosmology and particle physics, molecular genetics and evolutionary theory, but we do know how to think about them .... With consciousness, however, we are still in a terrible muddle. Consciousness stands alone today as a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused. And, as with all of the earlier mysteries, there are many who insist -- and hope -- that there will never be a demystification of consciousness."
— Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained)

"But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women."
— Audre Lorde

"Live simply. Deepest joy is like a flower....beautiful in essence."
— Tony Samara

"Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way."
— Kingsley Amis

"Within each of us is a light, awake, encoded in the fibers of our existence. Divine ecstasy is the totality of this marvelous creation experienced in the hearts of humanity"
— Tony Samara

"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 (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"I know that these mental disturbances of mine are not dangerous and give no promise of a storm; to express what I complain of in apt metaphor, I am distressed, not by a tempest, but by sea-sickness. "
— Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Stoic Philosophy of Seneca Essays and Letters)

"[Consciousness] is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation."
— C.S. Lewis

"Consciousness, unprovable by scientific standards, is forever, then, the impossible phantom in the predictable biologic machine, and your every thought a genuine supernatural event. Your every thought is a ghost, dancing."
— Alan Moore (Promethea: Book Five)

"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

"Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external reality"
— Oliver W. Sacks

"Control of consciousness determines the quality of life."
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience)

"My experience is what I agree to attend to."
— William James

"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 (The Interpretation of Dreams)

"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 (Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind)

"It is the power of a mind to be unconquerable."
— Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Stoic Philosophy of Seneca Essays and Letters)

""Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.""
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

"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 (Promethea: Book Five)

"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 (Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life)

"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 (Oliver Twist)

"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

"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 (The Pirate's Daughter)

"The inception of human consciousness, the genesis of awareness, must have entailed prolonged 'condensations' around intractable nodes of wonder and terror, at the discriminations to be made between the self and the other, between being and non-being (the discovery of the scandal of death)."
— George Steiner (Real Presences)

"The highest activities of consciousness have their origins in physical occurrences of the brain just as the loveliest melodies are not too sublime to be expressed by notes."
— W. Somerset Maugham

"There may be in literature, music and the arts lineaments, spoors of a presentness prior to consciousness and to rationality as we know them. There may be vestiges of a pre-logical, certainly a pre-grammatical sedimentation of visual and auditory matter, of sequences (as in narrative and music)."
— George Steiner (Real Presences)

"The experience of the poetic, of the freedom of being made intelligible form, could communicate to us something of the incipience of human self-realization, of the first encounter with the self. The analogy I have in mind would be that of 'background radiation,' of 'background noise' in which astrophysicists and cosmologists see tracers leading towards, and vestiges of, the origins of the universe."
— George Steiner (Real Presences)