Edmund Husserl Quotes

It seems to me a worthy goal: try to create a representation of consciousness that's durable and truthful, i.e., that accounts, somewhat, for all the strange, tiny, hard-to-articulate, instantaneous, unwilled things that actually go on in our minds in the course of a given day, or even a given moment.

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

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

What is the meaning of the togetherness of the perceiving mind, in that peculiar modification of perceiving which makes it perceive not a star but a tree, and the tree itself, is a problem for philosophy.

Consciousness is the feel of accessing memory.

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

Scott Fitzgerald said famously that "he who invented consciousness would have a lot to be blamed for." But he also forgot that without consciousness, he would have no access to true happiness or even the possibility of transcendence.

Awareness means the capacity to see a coffeepot and hear the birds sing in one's own way and not the way one was taught.

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.

A conscious mind is a mind with a self in it.

Pain and pleasure occur in consciousness and exist only there

The night dreamer cannot articulate a cogito. The night dream is a dream without a dreamer.

Whatever we know without inference is mental.

Strictly speaking, you don't think: Thinking happens to you.

I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I'm in the psyche.

We are not passive exhibitors of visual or auditory or tactile images. We have selves. We have a Me that is automatically present in our minds right now.

Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.

it is in our minds that we live much of our life.

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

There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.

Leisure requires the evidence of our own feelings, because it is not so much a quality of time as a peculiar state of mind. ... What being at leisure means is more easily felt than defined.

But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It. . . . Does the tree then have consciousness, similar to our own? I have no experience of that. But thinking that you have brought this off in your own case, must you again divide the indivisible? What I encounter is neither the soul of a tree nor a dryad, but the tree itself.

Thoughts are going by like a river; awareness simply is.

Being is seeing in the human dimension.

Because waking I often observe the absurdity of dreams, but never dream of the absurdities of my waking thoughts, I am well satisfied that being awake, I know I dream not; though when I dream, I think myself awake.