Susanna Kaysen Quotes

Do you even recognize your own consciousness?

Consciousness is the foundation of all thinking; and thinking is the foundation of all consciousness.

At times I think and at times I am.

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

A conscious mind is a mind with a self in it.

Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.

What we call a mind is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations and supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with a perfect simplicity and identity.

All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness [...] At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find [...] a being which immediately recognises itself, [...] and which knows its own existence, not by observation and as a given fact, nor by inference from any idea of itself, but through direct contact with that existence. Self-consciousness is the very being of mind in action.

It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve.

We are not passive exhibitors of visual or auditory or tactile images. We have selves. We have a Me that is automatically present in our minds right now.

We use concepts like "consciousness"---"mind"---"personality," but we don't really know yet what these things are.' He was shaking his head. 'Not really. Not at all.

The feeling of an unbridgeable gulf between consciousness and brain-process:When does this feeling occur in the present case?It is when I (for example) turn my attention in a particular way on to my own consciousness, and, astonished, say to myself: THIS is supposed to be produced by a process in the brain!--as it were clutching my forehead.

I think and that is all that I am.

The great mystery of our consciousness is beyond our grasp.

Life is but thought.

What's more valuable - intelligence or consciousness?

A subject emerges from an interaction between my self, my I, and my medium.

Sometimes I think, sometimes I am .

Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.

No one has ever seen the self. It has no visible shape, nor does it occupy measurable space. It is an abstraction, like other abstractions equally elusive: the individual, the mind, the society

I desire therefore I exist.

Whatever we know without inference is mental.

If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind.

MIND, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavour to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

Life in the true sense is perceiving or thinking.