Antonio Damasio Quotes

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

Consciousness is a sea ringed with visions.

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.

The mind is a kind of theater, where several perceptions successively make their appearence; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.

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

In Psychology we deal with minds and their processes, and leave out of account as far as possible the objects that we get to know by means of them.

In my head there are several windows, that I do know, but perhaps it is always the same one, open variously on the parading universe.

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

How do we see physically? No differently that we do in our consciousness - by means of the productive power of imagination. Consciousness is the eye and ear, the sense for inner and outer meaning.

One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind.

To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses and what they can tell us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.

Space is all one space and thought is all one thought, but my mind divides its spaces into spaces into spaces and thoughts into thoughts into thoughts. Like a large condominium. Occasionally I think about the one Space and the one Thought, but usually I don't. Usually I think about my condominium.

The mind is the seat of perception of the things we see, hear, and feel. It is through the mind that we see the beauties of the earth and sky, or music, of art, in fact, of everything. That silent shuttle of thought working in and out through cell and nerve weaves into one harmonious whole the myriad moods of mind, and we call it life.

But when reflexion begins to play upon these objects... like some trick of magic each object is loosed into a group of impressions - colour, odour, texture... And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world... the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind.

The leading edge of reality is mind, and mind is the primary substratum of being.

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

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.

That in the soul which is called the mind is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing.

It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve.

When you understand how the mind-brain functions together, you know that faith, which is believing before seeing, is the natural process of creation.

Every morning we awaken from sleep and from our dreams and enter the state we call wakefulness. A continuous stream of thoughts, most of them repetitive, characterizes the normal wakeful state.

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and considered by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being.

Consciousness is the foundation of all thinking; and thinking is the foundation of all consciousness.

The world doesn't just disappear when you close your eyes, does it?

The difference between closing or opening your eyes is the choice between the imagined vs real. Blinking is only human.