Claire Messud Quotes

There are two worlds we live in: a material world, bound by the laws of physics, and the world inside our mind, which is just as important.

Everything else you see and experience in this world is effect, and that includes your feelings. The cause is always your thoughts.

Without consciousness, space and time are nothing.

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

What do you think of the human mind? I mean, in case you think there is a human mind.

The mind is the reality. You are what you think.

Doth the Reality of sensible things consist in being perceived? or, is it something distinct from their being perceived, and that bears no relation to the mind?

Our thoughts make us what we are.

That in the soul which is called the mind is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing.

The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose.

How much of what we call 'reality' is actually out there or rather within our own head?

At bottom there is but one subject of study: the forms and metamorphoses of mind. All other subjects may be reduced to that; all other studies bring us back to this study.

People often ask how I got interested in the brain; my rhetorical answer is: 'How can anyone NOT be interested in it?' Everything you call 'human nature' and consciousness arises from it.

From the perspective of mere representation, the external world always remains only a phenomenon.

In all the sciences except Psychology we deal with objects and their changes, and leave out of account as far as possible the mind which observes them.

Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.

If you're a thinking person, the liver is interesting, but nothing is more intriguing than the brain.

The great mystery of our consciousness is beyond our grasp.

No matter how closely you examine the water, glucose, and electrolyte salts in the human brain, you can't find the point where these molecules became conscious.

The brain is an immensely complex organ, and many mysteries remain. Exactly how brain and mind or soma and psyche are related is one of them.

Consciousness, for me, is a manifestation of complexity in biology. It's an emergent property.

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

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

In Psychology we deal with minds and their processes, and leave out of account as far as possible the objects that we get to know by means of them.

People have wanted to look inside the human mind, the human brain, for thousands of years.