Thomas Huxley Quotes

We have the notion that we exist but we have no way to prove it. 'I am' is the closest foundation we can get.

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

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

I do not believe that I am now dreaming, but I cannot prove that I am not. I am, however, quite certain that I am having certain experiences, whether they be those of a dream or those of waking life.

Science does not deal with subjective experience... Well that's too bad because that is all any of us ever have.

Il n'y a pas d'autre univers qu'un univers humain, l'univers de la subjectivite humaine. There is no other universe except the human universe, the universe of human subjectivity.

To be is to be perceived

The world is real. Consciousness is the illusion.

On the other hand, for the whole human being who wills, feels, and represents, external reality is given simultaneously and with as much certitude as his own self.

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

The distinguishing characteristics of mind are of a subjective sort; we know them only from the contents of our own consciousness.

I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world.

Man is the apex of the only world we can ever know.

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

I can feel this heart inside me and I conclude it exists. I can touch this world and I also conclude that it exists. All my knowledge ends at this point. The rest is hypothesis.

I'm the idea of the human imagination, which, when you think about it, is the only thing we can really be certain ISN'T imaginary.

Since no one can ever know for certain whether or not his own view of life is the correct one, it is absolutely impossible for him to know if someone else's is the wrong one.

I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. We can know only that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree.

The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.

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

Your mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it and thinking about it but without this mind, you call it, the orange would not be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or even mentally noticed, it's actually, that orange, depending on your mind to exist! Don't you see that? By itself it's a no-thing, it's really mental, it's seen only of your mind. In other words it's empty and awake.

The physical universe that you see is all in your mind. When you turn your mind off, or become unconscious, the physical universe, for you, disappears. Then, when you awaken your consciousness, the universe reappears magically. Quite simple really - no thoughts on your part, no physical world. As Walt Whitman succinctly stated: "The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual - namely to You." Without your mind to process it, the universe simply disappears into nothingness.

What is reality if it isn't how we feel about things?

Because of its concrete content, sense-certainty immediately appears as the richest kind of knowledge, indeed a knowledge of infinite wealth for which no bounds can be found, either when we reach out into space and time in which it is dispersed, or when we take a bit of this wealth, and by division enter into it. Moreover, sense-certainty appears to be the truest knowledge ... but, in the event, this very certainty proves itself to be the most abstract and poorest truth. All that it says about what it knows is just that it is; and its truth contains nothing but the sheer being of the thing.

They do not think, therefore they are not.