Vladimir Lenin Quotes

Common sense says that chairs and tables exist independently of whether anyone happens to perceive them or not.

The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.

Logic doesn't apply to the real world. D. R. Hofstadter and D. C. Dennett (eds.) The Mind's I, 1981.

An object dies when the gaze that lights on it has disappeared.

The only laws of matter are those that our minds must fabricate and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.

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

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind

What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses.

Intellectualism' is the belief that our mind comes upon a world complete in itself, and has the duty of ascertaining its contents; but has no power of re-determining its character, for that is already given.

The sole "property" of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside the mind.

If minds are wholly dependent on brains and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.

Sense-perceptions can only be indirect knowledge, and not direct knowledge. Only one's own awareness is direct knowledge.

Do you even recognize your own consciousness?

Sensations are nothing but confused modes of thinking.

Philosophers say that nothing can be seen that is neither illuminated nor colored.

The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.

Thinking... is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas

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

Subjectivity is objective.

There is no realism without an element of idealism.

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

Whatever is immediately perceived is an idea: and can any idea exist out of the mind?

Life in the true sense is perceiving or thinking.

The Here-and-Now demands attention, is more present to us. We dismiss the inner world of our ideas as less important, although most of our immediate physical reality originated only in the mind. The TV, sofa, clock and room, the whole civilisation that contains them once were nothing save ideas.