Fernando Pessoa Quotes

Even when I was studying mathematics, physics, and computer science, it always seemed that the problem of consciousness was about the most interesting problem out there for science to come to grips with.

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.

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

At times I think and at times I am.

Sometimes I think, sometimes I am .

My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think… and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment - it's frightful - if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire.

--then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?

They do not think, therefore they are not.

Sensations are nothing but confused modes of thinking.

I prefer thought to action, an idea to a transaction, contemplation to activity.

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

Mind cannot think without duality. Duality is the way of thinking. In silence, all dualities disappear.

Consciousness, there are about 20,000 papers on consciousness with no consensus. Nowhere in history have so many people devoted so much time to produce so little.

I think and that is all that I am.

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.

Philosophy wasn't about facts, it was about ideas. My first essay title was something like: 'How can you know what other people are thinking?' I thought, 'Wow, what an amazing thing.' I really thought deeply for the first time.

Lofty questions about the mind are fascinating to ask, philosophers have been asking them for three millennia both in India where I am from and here in the West - but it is only in the brain that we can eventually hope to find the answers.

The great mystery of our consciousness is beyond our grasp.

If you stare at a wall from four in the morning till nine at night, and you do that for a week, you are getting pretty close to nothingness.

Studying consciousness tells us more about how the world is fundamentally strange. I think we have a few revolutions to go yet before we get to the bottom of it.

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

If you don't ponder the end of the world on a regular basis, I don't think you're really human.

I think, therefore I am.