Bertrand Russell Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

How do you know, right now, that you are aware of being aware, or conscious?

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

It's one thing thinking something and another thing knowing it.

If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn't even know you are thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he is dreaming. When you know you are dreaming, you are awake within the dream.

I am not omniscient, but I know a lot.

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

Thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought

... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.

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.

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

The feeling of an unbridgeable gulf between consciousness and brain-process:When does this feeling occur in the present case?It is when I (for example) turn my attention in a particular way on to my own consciousness, and, astonished, say to myself: THIS is supposed to be produced by a process in the brain!--as it were clutching my forehead.

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

All thinking, knowing, perception, space-time, occur in consciousness. You are a non-local consciousness. The world is in you.

To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one's being added to that being.

The great mystery of our consciousness is beyond our grasp.

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

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.

Everybody agrees that the brain is a remarkable machine. It's capable of generating an enormous number of phenomena, some of them very obvious and some of them less obvious. But I think that in the end there are going to be some very basic explanations for many things: emotions, awareness, consciousness, attention, perception, recognition.

How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.

The animal is ignorant of the fact that he knows. The man is aware of the fact that he is ignorant.

We all know what we know. We experience with our minds and breath.