Robert Irwin Quotes

On the other hand, for the whole human being who wills, feels, and represents, external reality is given simultaneously and with as much certitude as his own self.

The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything.

The physical body is conceived and constructed in consciousness as are time and space. All happens within our self.

To hate, to love, to think, to feel, to see; all this is nothing but to perceive.

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

The world is real. Consciousness is the illusion.

What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

Life is but thought.

I dream, therefore I exist.

The universe is wonderful, but only when there is somebody there to wonder at it.

Without consciousness, space and time are nothing.

Einstein said, if everything exists as a substance of qualities, and qualities exist only in mind, then all is mind.

It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.

The existence of inherent limits of experience in no way settles the question about the subordination of facts of the human world to our knowledge of matter.

I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world.

I--this thought which is called I--is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax.

You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself." "Hang on, can I write this down?" said Arthur, excitedly fumbling in his pocket for a pencil.

But we shall not know the world by looking at it; we know it by looking at the hovering fly.

Time is, of all modes of existence, most obsequious to the imagination.

Without knowing the Knower, all the knowledge that one gathers cannot be valid.

Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness,--these are the threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life.

I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. We can know only that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree.

Your mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it and thinking about it but without this mind, you call it, the orange would not be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or even mentally noticed, it's actually, that orange, depending on your mind to exist! Don't you see that? By itself it's a no-thing, it's really mental, it's seen only of your mind. In other words it's empty and awake.