Knowledge × Consciousness

Knowledge and Consciousness

Browse 30 quotations catalogued under knowledge with "consciousness" in the text or topic label. Read matching entries and available source details.

30 quotes

This collection contains 30 quotations filed under Knowledge with "consciousness" in the quote text or topic label. These keyword matches offer a starting point for exploring Knowledge and Consciousness; they do not by themselves establish a shared argument or a historical connection between the authors.

The authors represented include William James, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Stuart Mill, Arthur Schopenhauer, and others. Read each quotation in its own context rather than assuming that these authors share a position.

One matching quotation reads: "The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous…" The full quotation and any available source details appear below.

Another matching quotation reads: "What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display cas…" Compare the wording and source context to decide how each passage relates to your question.

Use the quotation links to explore individual entries and the author links to visit their profiles on QuoteLineage. For broader reading beyond these keyword matches, explore all Knowledge quotes or the concept page for Consciousness.

30 Quotes on Knowledge and Consciousness

"The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself."

— William James

"What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case? Does nature not conceal most things from him — even concerning his own body — in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers! She threw away the key."

— Friedrich Nietzsche

"Whatever is known to us by consciousness, is known beyond possibility of question. What one sees or feels, whether bodily or mentally, one cannot but be sure that one sees or feels. No science is required for the purpose of establishing such truths; no rules of art can render our knowledge of them more certain than it is in itself. There is no logic for this portion of our knowledge."

— John Stuart Mill

"Spinoza says that if a stone which has been projected through the air, had consciousness, it would believe that it was moving of its own free will. I add this only, that the stone would be right. The impulse given it is for the stone what the motive is for me, and what in the case of the stone appears as cohesion, gravitation, rigidity, is in its inner nature the same as that which I recognise in myself as will, and what the stone also, if knowledge were given to it, would recognise as will."

— Arthur Schopenhauer

"If Diddy already knows what he does that's foolish and stupid, why can't he become wise? Act wisely. For, oh, Diddy has perceived his follies countless times. Is heartily ashamed of them, strenuously repudiates them. It's only that he doesn't understand. Not really. A hopeless, bumbling tourist in the somber labyrinth of his own consciousness."

— Susan Sontag

"The overemphasis on the Baconian doctrine of knowledge as power, and the accompanying concern with gaining power over nature as well as over ourselves in the sense of treating ourself as objects to be manipulated rather than human beings whose aim is to expand in meaningful living, have resulted in the invalidation of the self. This tends to shrink the individual's consciousness, to block off his awareness, and thus play into … unconstructive anxiety … I propose that the aim of education is exactly the opposite, namely, the widening and deepening of consciousness. To the extent that education can help the student develop sensitivity, depth of perception, and above all the capacity to perceive significant forms in what he is studying, it will be developing at the same time the student's capacity to deal with anxiety constructively."

"If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature—the nearest thing to a sacramental human activity acknowledged by secular society—it is because one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness and reporting back what’s there."

— Susan Sontag

"Repression invades the academic enterprise itself, even prior to all restrictions on academic freedom. The pre-empting of the mind vitiates impartiality and objectivity: unless the student learns to think in the opposite direction, he will be inclined to place the facts into the predominant framework of values. Scholarship, i.e., the acquisition and communication of knowledge, prohibits the purification and isolation of facts from the context of the whole truth. An essential part of the latter is recognition of the frightening extent to which history is made and recorded by and for the victors, that is, the extent to which history was the development of oppression. And this oppression is in the facts themselves which it establishes; thus they themselves carry a negative value as part and aspect of their facticity. To treat the great crusades against humanity with the same impartiality as the desperate struggles for humanity means neutralizing their opposite historical function, reconciling the executioners with their victims, distorting the record. Such spurious neutrality serves to reproduce acceptance of the dominion of the victors in the consciousness of man."

— Herbert Marcuse

"We now understand how very complex and even apparently intelligent phenomena, such as genetic coding, the immune system, and low-level visual processing, can be accomplished without a trace of consciousness. But this seems to uncover an enormous puzzle of just what, if anything, consciousness is for. Can a conscious entity do anything for itself that an unconscious simulation of that entity couldn't do for itself?"

— Daniel Dennett

"Consciousness must essentially cover an interval of time; for if it did not, we could gain no knowledge of time, and not merely no veracious cognition of it, but no conception whatever. We are therefore, forced to say that we are immediately conscious through an infinitesimal interval of time."

— Charles Sanders Peirce

"This book, admirable in so many respects, power in its break and style, is even more intimidating for me in that, having formely had the good fortune to study under Michel Foucault, I retain the consciousness of an admiring and grateful disciple. Now, the disciple's consciousness, when he starts, I would not say to dispute, but to engage in dialogue with the master or, better, to articulate the interminable and silent dialogue which made him into a disciple-this disciple's consciousness is an unhappy consciousness."

— Jacques Derrida

"The only possible alternative is simply to keep to immediate experience that consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown; that there is only one thing and that what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception ; the same illusion is produced in a gallery of mirrors, and in the same way Gaurisankar and Mt Everest turned out to be the same peak seen from different valleys."

— Erwin Schrödinger

"The modern proletarian class doesn't carry out its struggle according to a plan set out in some book or theory; the modern workers' struggle is a part of history, a part of social progress, and in the middle of history, in the middle of progress, in the middle of the fight, we learn how we must fight... That's exactly what is laudable about it, that's exactly why this colossal piece of culture, within the modern workers' movement, is epoch-defining: that the great masses of the working people first forge from their own consciousness, from their own belief, and even from their own understanding the weapons of their own liberation."

— Rosa Luxemburg

"Apparently the rise of consciousness is linked to certain kinds of privation. It is the bitterness of self-consciousness that we knowers know best. Critical of the illusions that sustained mankind in earlier times, this self-consciousness of ours does little to sustain us now. The question is: which is disenchanted, the world itself or the consciousness we have of it?"

— Saul Bellow

"Class consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only outside of the economic struggle, outside of the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the phere of relationships between all the various classes and strata and the state and the government-the sphere of the interrelations between all the various classes."

— Vladimir Lenin

"“But when we have reached this conclusive conviction that the roots of our experience and our experimental knowledge are parts of our own spontaneous life, we then readily come to see, further, that the system of our several elements of consciousness a priori is precisely what we must really understand by our unifying or enwholing self, — is exactly what we try to express when we say we have a soul, and that this soul possesses real knowledge; that is, a hold upon eternal things. The realm of the eternal, in short, then becomes for us just the realm of our self-active intelligence; and this it is which, if we can show its reality in detail, will prove to be the clue to our immortal being."

— George Holmes Howison

"Slowly but inexorably crawling upon my consciousness and rising above every other impression, came a dizzying fear of the unknown; a fear all the greater because I could not analyse it, and seeming to concern a stealthily approaching menace; not death, but some nameless, unheard-of thing inexpressibly more ghastly and abhorrent."

— H. P. Lovecraft

"Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition, which is opposed to everything infinite. Our ever-insufficient knowledge of the future opposes it: and this is called, in the one instance, hope, and and in the other, uncertainty of the following day. The certainty of death opposes it: for it places a limit on every joy, but also on every grief. The inevitable material cares oppose it: for as they poison every lasting happiness, they equally assiduously distract us from our misfortunes and make our consciousness of them intermittent and hence supportable."

"Quickly or slowly, according as that probation is lived nobly or poorly, another summons comes to him, when the Master sees that he has gained to a considerable extent the Qualifications which are necessary, and needs a further fuller teaching in order that he may apply his knowledge more efficiently to life. Again he is called; again he sees his Master. And then the Master accepts him as disciple, no longer on probation, but accepted and approved; now his consciousness is to begin to blend with the consciousness of his Master, and he is to feel His presence more clearly. p.63"

— Annie Besant

"Frank II liked Spain. Philip's capital was gayer, warmer, and more sanitary than London. It was intoxicating to enjoy the best of both courts. It proved also extremely remunerative: the shared consciousness of Frank I and II was by far the quickest communicational link between the two rival countries, and as such was worth money. Not that Frank revealed his secret to a soul, but he let it be known he had a fleet of capable spies who moved without risk of detection between England and Spain. Burly Lord Burleigh beamed upon him. So did the Duke of Medina Sidonia."

— Brian Aldiss

"Civilizations and social orders have not been geared to the fulfillment of human potential , but to the suppression of abilities that did not fit in with the basic assumptions about the nature of the self. We inhibited any such evidence from conscious awareness, developing a kind of one-line official consciousness. Opposing data did not disappear, but formed powerful undercurrents that composed the unofficial knowledge of the race."

— Jane Roberts

"Sooner or later, if human society is to evolve—indeed, if it is to survive—we must match our lives to our new knowledge. For too long, the Two Cultures—the esthetic, feeling humanities and cool, analytical science—have functioned independently, like the right and left hemispheres of a split-brain patient. We have been the victims of our collective divided consciousness."

— Marilyn Ferguson

"One of our immediate educational objectives must be the elimination of the competitive spirit, and the substitution of the co-operative consciousness. p. 74"

— Alice Bailey

"Shirk not these crises, hard and difficult though they may appear to be. Difficult they are. Forget not that the habit of confronting crises, is a long-established one within the consciousness of humanity. Man has the "habit of crisis", if I may so call it. They are only the points of examination as to the strength, purpose, purity and motive and the intent of the soul. They evoke confidence when surmounted, and produce greatly expanded vision. They foster compassion and understanding, for the pain and inner conflict they have engendered is never forgotten, for they draw upon the resources of the heart. They release the light of wisdom within the field of knowledge, and the world is thereby enriched. p. 477"

— Alice Bailey

"But I still couldn't quite believe in personal life after death. I preferred to think of our psychic experiences as emphasizing, instead, the unknown abilities of our present consciousness. "The Seth material could be coming from some deep inner source, an intuitive bank of inner knowledge available to everyone if they only look for it," I said."

— Jane Roberts

"The Transcendentalists — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and Margaret Fuller, along with several dozen others — rebelled against what seemed the dead, dry intellectualism of the day. Something was missing — an invisible dimension of reality they sometimes called the Oversoul. They sought understanding from many sources: experience, intuition, the Quaker idea of the Inner Light, the Bhagavad Gita, the German Romantic philosophers, historian Thomas Carlyle, poet Samuel Coleridge, Swedenborg, the English metaphysical writers of the seventeenth century. Their term for intuition was "transcendental reason." They anticipated the consciousness research of our time in their belief that the brain's other mode of knowing is not an alternative to normal reasoning but a kind of transcendent logic — too fast and complex for us to follow with the step-by-step reasoning powers of our everyday consciousness."

— Marilyn Ferguson

"Society becomes more wholesome, more serene, and spiritually healthier, if it knows that its citizens have at the back of their consciousness the knowledge that not only themselves, but all their fellows, have access, when ill, to the best that medical care can provide."

— Aneurin Bevan

"Thus far woman has struggled through life with bandaged eyes, accepting the dogma of her weakness and inability to take care of herself not only physically but intellectually. She has held out a trembling hand and received gratefully the proffered aid. She has foregone her right to study, to know the laws and purposes of government to which she is subject. But there is now awakened in her a consciousness that she is defrauded of her legitimate Rights and that she never can fulfill her mission until she is placed in that position to which she feels herself called by the divinity within. Hitherto she has surrendered her person and her individuality to man, but she can no longer do this and not feel that she is outraging her nature and her God."

— Sarah Grimké

"To be conscious is to be consciousness: Consciousness, the knower in you, cannot be known, although it can be experienced. You can experience consciousness now by experiencing the fact that you exist."

"What then is the universe for, and for what final purpose is man the immortal thinker here in evolution? It is all for the experience and emancipation of the soul, for the purpose of raising the entire mass of manifested matter up to the stature, nature, and dignity of conscious god-hood. The great aim is to reach self-consciousness; not through a race or a tribe or some favored nation, but by and through the perfecting, after transformation, of the whole mass of matter as well as what we now call soul. Nothing is or is to be left out. The aim for present man is his initiation into complete knowledge, and for the other kingdoms below him that they may be raised up gradually from stage to stage to be in time initiated also."

— William Quan Judge

Key thinkers on this theme

William James· Psychology Friedrich Nietzsche· Philosophy John Stuart Mill· Philosophy Arthur Schopenhauer· Philosophy Susan Sontag· Literature

Related ideas in Knowledge

All Knowledge quotes Explore the idea of Consciousness