Marcel Proust Quotes

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.

Another problem of fragmentation is that thought divides itself from feeling and from the body. Thought is said to be the mind; we have the notion that it is something abstract or spiritual or immaterial. Then there is the body, which is very physical. And we have emotions, which are perhaps somewhere in between. The idea is that they are all different. That is, we think of them as different. And we experience them as different because we think of them as different.

We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a seperate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body-a center which "confronts" an "external" world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange.

Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.

Light comes to us by the sensibility. Without visual sensibility there is no light, no movement.

When I see a colour or hear a sound, I am aware of something, and not of nothing.

The perceptive act is a reaction of the mind upon the object of which it is the perception.

What is the meaning of the togetherness of the perceiving mind, in that peculiar modification of perceiving which makes it perceive not a star but a tree, and the tree itself, is a problem for philosophy.

In many instances, order is apprehended first of all by the senses.

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

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

Each one of us interprets various stimuli according to our own personal sensibility.

The forms of my awareness are richer than yours.

You can live your whole life in your brain and not experience what's around you. You go crazy that way.

As instruments for knowing the objects, the sense organs are outside, and so they are called outer senses; and the mind is called the inner sense because it is inside. But the distinction between inner and outer is only with reference to the body; in truth, there is neither inner nor outer. The mind's nature is to remain pure like ether.

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, and consciousness is the ability to feel things and have subjective experiences.

The world consists of images on a screen, and consciousness is the steady light that emanates from the projector.

There are two distinctive peculiarities by reference to which we characterize the soul (1) local movement and (2) thinking, discriminating, and perceiving. Thinking both speculative and practical is regarded as akin to a form of perceiving; for in the one as well as the other the soul discriminates and is cognizant of something which is.

The senses collect the surface facts of matter... It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience; when mind acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.

Yeah. Iʼve always felt this way. I mean weʼre born alone, we die alone. And while weʼre here we are absolutely, completely sealed in our own bodies. Really weird. Kinda freaks me out to think about it. We can only experience the outside world through our own slanted perception of it. Who knows what youʼre really like. I just see what I think youʼre like.

In the space which thought creates around itself there is no love. This space divides man from man.

When this delusion of utter separateness underlies and governs whatever I think, say, and do, what kind of world do I create?

Is perception equivalent to existence?

Perhaps I'm dead. Perhaps this is all it will be. The living will carry on in their world – touching, walking. And I'll continue in this empty world, tapping soundlessly on the glass between us.

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.