Shirley Jackson Quotes

When I see a colour or hear a sound, I am aware of something, and not of nothing.

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, and consciousness is the ability to feel things and have subjective experiences.

To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses and what they can tell us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.

It is clear that every immediate object of our senses both exists and is real in the primary meaning of these terms so long as we remain aware of the object.

The forms of my awareness are richer than yours.

I like to use light as a material, but my medium is actually perception. I want you to sense yourself sensing - to see yourself seeing.

We are astonished at thought, but sensation is equally wonderful.

We all know what we know. We experience with our minds and breath.

Consciousness is the perception of what passes in man's own mind.

If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn't even know you are thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he is dreaming. When you know you are dreaming, you are awake within the dream.

I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.

It is consciousness that sets all limits of life, if there are any limits.

Everything can be seen directly except the eye through which we see.

We have been so blinded by thinking and feeling that we have never seen the World.

Thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought

The five senses are the ministers of the soul.

Consciousness in the individual is that area where the totality of life is located.

Pain and pleasure occur in consciousness and exist only there

Whatever we know without inference is mental.

It was my misfortune-or salvation-to be at all times perfectly conscious of my misperceptions of reality.

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.

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and considered by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being.

Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, " This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in; fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well! It must have been made to have me in it!

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