Isaac Asimov Quotes

To know, to think, to dream. That is everything.

I think that in general it is a good plan occasionally to bear in mind the fact that people were in the habit of dreaming before there was such a thing as psychoanalysis.

"Well, it's no use your talking about waking him," said Tweedledum, "when you're only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not real."

I'm not sure if I could tell the difference—between just staring into space and thinking. We're usually thinking all the time, aren't we? Not that we live in order to think, but the opposite isn't true either—that we think in order to live. I believe, contrary to Descartes, that we sometimes think in order not to be. Staring into space might unintentionally have the opposite effect.

Either one does not dream, or one does so interestingly. One should learn to spend one's waking life in the same way: not at all, or interestingly.

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.

You can't think of nothing.

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

And as well as I dream, I reason if I want, for that's just another kind of dream.

Much has been written about the life of the mind.

I dream, therefore I exist.

That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

I don't talk about consciousness. I talk about interiority.

Is it not the play of the mind we are after? Is it not that that shows a mind is there at all?

To think is an act. To feel is a fact.

What is an "I", and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, as poet Russell Edson once wonderfully phrased it, "teetering bulbs of dread and dream" - that is, only in association with certain kinds of gooey lumps encased in hard protective shells mounted atop mobile pedestals that roam the world on pairs of slightly fuzzy, jointed stilts?

Stories make you think and dream; books make you want to ask questions.

The actuality of thought is life.

Age continually alters the faces of those who think or study, and so their portraits differ from one another and don't even resemble them for very long. I dream so much and live so little that I'm sometimes only three years old. But the next day I'm three hundred, if the dream has been sombre.

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.

He who passes not his days in the realm of dreams is the slave of the days.

If you dream you do something, it's as if you actually are doing it from your brain's point of view.