Wilhelm Wundt Quotes

They do not think, therefore they are not.

Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.

Mental events, it is said, are not passive happenings but the acts of a subject.

Anyway, there is a lot of really interesting work going on in the neuroscience and psychology of consciousness, and I would love to see philosophers become more closely involved with this.

We have to make philosophy itself an object of philosophical concern.

Consciousness, rather than being something that we have, is something we participate in.

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

I know that I'm not my body, and I also know that you're not yours.

The actuality of thought is life.

Consciousness is cerebral celebrity--nothing more and nothing less. Those contents are conscious that persevere, that monopolize resources long enough to achieve certain typical and "symptomatic" effects--on memory, on the control of behavior and so forth.

Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake.

Whatever we know without inference is mental.

What shall I compare it to, this fantastic thing I call my Mind? To a waste-paper basket, to a sieve choked with sediment, or to a barrel full of floating froth and refuse? No, what it is really most like is a spider's web, insecurely hung on leaves and twigs, quivering in every wind, and sprinkled with dewdrops and dead flies. And at its centre, pondering forever the Problem of Existence, sits motionless the spider-like and uncanny Soul.

Something about the topic of consciousness makes people, like the White Queen in Through The Looking Glass, believe six impossible things before breakfast.

I dream a dream that dreams back at me.

The mind is a strange and wonderful thing. I'm not sure it'll ever be able to figure itself out. Everything else maybe, from the atom to the universe, everything except itself.

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum -- "I think that I think, therefore I think that I am;" as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.

Breathless and unharmed, we emerge from the mazes of metaphysics and psychology where man and the soul are playing hide-and-seek.

Man is the only one in whom the instinct of life falters long enough to enable it to ask the question "Why?

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

Some lose all mind and become soul,insane. some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual. some lose both and become accepted

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.

It is part of the pholosophic dullness of our time that there are millions of rational monsters walking about on their hind legs, observing the world through pairs of flexible little lenses, periodically supplying themselves with energy by pushing organic substances through holes in their faces, who see nothing fabulous whatever about themselves.

Memory marks the horizon of our consciousness, imagination its zenith.

A long time ago, Descartes sad, “I think, therefore I am.” But if you are not thinking, what?