Thomas Nagel Quotes

Life is consciousness.

I know that I have lived because I have felt, and, feeling giving me the knowledge of my existence.

The problem is we think we exist.

We can conceive a thinking being to have either many or few perceptions. Suppose the mind to be reduced even below the life of anoyster. Suppose it to have only one perception, as of thirst or hunger. Consider it in that situation. Do you conceive any thing but merely that perception? Have you any notion of self or substance? If not, the addition of other perceptions can never give you that notion.

The very act of questioning whether you exist proves you do, because you must be there for the doubt to be entertained in the first place.

I've always thought that we are what we remember, and the less we remember, the less we are.

Where you are in consciousness has everything to do with what you see in experience.

Our nature is the mind. And the mind is our nature.

If you look at all the notions we accept about who we are, you find that they are all based upon our perceptual experiences.

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.

That I am not my experiences is very obvious. I am the one who is having those experiences. Spirituality has nothing to do with experience.

I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.

Do you even recognize your own consciousness?

Consciousness ... is the phenomenon whereby the universe's very existence is made known.

This perceiving, active being is what I call mind, spirit, soul, or myself. By which words I do not denote any one of my ideas, but a thing entirely distinct from them, wherein they exist, or, which is the same thing, whereby they are perceived; for the existence of an idea consists in being perceived.

You are the knowing, not the condition that is known.

I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.

Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.

I tell, therefore you are.

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.

Also, where does your identity come from? Your memory, of course.

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.

Self awareness is NOT just a bunch of amino acids bumping together.

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.

I never, for instance, have the urge to paint animals 'the way I see them,' but rather the way they are... The way they themselves look at the world and feel their being