Virginia Woolf Quotes

How do you know, right now, that you are aware of being aware, or conscious?

Consciousness - that, to me, is the theme of the modern novel.

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.

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

At any moment in time, our reality is based on whatever we focus on.

Consciousness is nothing but awareness the composite of all the thing we pay attention to.

Life is but thought.

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

The forms of my awareness are richer than yours.

There's a constant drip and trickle of life that goes into one's awareness really and consciousness of things.

Dreaming or awake, we perceive only events that have meaning to us.

How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.

Where conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed.

I don't talk about consciousness. I talk about interiority.

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.

Pause now to ask yourself the following question: 'Am I dreaming or awake, right now?' Be serious, really try to answer the question to the best of your ability and be ready to justify your answer.

We never see a tree except through the image that we have of it, the concept of that tree; but the concept, the knowledge, the experience, is entirely different from the actual tree. Look at a tree and you will find how extraordinarily difficult it is to see it completely, so that no image, no screen, comes between the seeing and the actual fact. By completely I mean with the totality of your mind and heart, not a fragment of it.

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

If I use the word consciousness, in our lab, in our institute, what we mean is the special quality of mind, the special features that exist in the mind, that permit us to know, for example, that we, ourselves, exist, and that things exist around us.

While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger and think about what you see.

All phenomena of which we are aware take place in our own minds, and therefore the only thing we have to look at is the mind; which is a more constant quantity over all the species of humanity than is generally supposed.

It's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I'd looked at so long that I'd ceased to see them.

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

We are not conscious of most things until we ask ourselves questions about them.