Matthew McConaughey Quotes

We misuse language and talk about the 'ascent' of man. We understand the scientific basis for the interrelatedness of life, but our ego hasn't caught up yet.

Anxiety is a natural thing humans have. You know, that's how we evolve. That's how we are, you know, we think things through. Sometimes my mind just thinks things through a lot.

What is it that really makes us, us? It's our collective intelligence. It's our ability to write things down, our language and our consciousness.

Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.

An animal takes freely anything that it wishes: it commits no sin and is not held responsible for its action because it knows no better. But as soon as the idea of 'mine' and 'thine' has been imprinted upon our consciousness, then also the responsibility comes.

So we can't go backwards, we can only go where the evolutionary trajectory is taking us and attune our ideas about ourselves and our existence to that course.

We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.

Thought once awakened does not again slumber.

The way we like to think of ourselves is not the way we look. We like to think of ourselves as more evolved than we frequently are.

I think that we are supernatural. We are unique. We're the only animals in the universe that we know of that actually have self-consciousness, a sense of time and our own mortality.

Who are we? That is the big question. And essentially we are just an upright-walking, big-brained, super-intelligent ape.

Man is not what he thinks he is, but what he thinks, he is.

For a long time humans probably were in touch on a deeper level with the depths of their being, unconsciously so, the same way an animal or a tree is. Gradually, though, more and more of their identity went into the movement of thought. They identified more and more with the movement of thinking.

We became Homo sapiens not that long ago, from the scientific perspective, and we've retained a lot of our beast nature. We've done all these amazing things in terms of our knowledge base and technology, and now we're flying around and using the internet. But we're still very animalistic. So, I think about hierarchies. I think about evolution. I think about how we stack up, how we sit on top of each other. How we pray that we know what we're up to.

I think we can all recognize in some way or another that we as a human species, have been granted an incredible gift of intentionality and of consciousness. Perhaps this gift is a hint to how we should conduct our lives.

The next step in human evolution is to transcend thought. This is now our urgent task. It doesn't mean not to think anymore, but simply not to be completely identified with thought, possessed by thought.

I thought about how odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people. The only activities I could think of that humans do that have no animal equivalent were smoking, body-building and writing. That's not much, considering how special we seem to think we are.

What distinguishes our species is thought. The cerebral cortex is in a way a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behavior patterns of lizards and baboons: territoriality and aggression and dominance hierarchies. We are each of us largely responsible for what gets put in to our brains. For what as adults we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain we can change ourselves. Think of the possibilities.

I think we give human beings too much credit. We're primates, you know.

The soul is characterized by these capacities; self-nutrition, sensation, thinking, and movement.

Man's Place in Nature.

I think of myself as a human being.

I am. I am, I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I don't want to think any more, I am because I think that I don't want to be, I think that I . . . because . . . ugh!

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?

Thinking is no more than a tiny aspect of the totality of consciousness, the totality of who you are.