Robert Musil Quotes

Strictly speaking, you don't think: Thinking happens to you.

I am the thought you are now thinking.

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

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

Inward is not a direction. Inward is a dimension.

What is the relationship between awareness and thinking? Awareness is the space in which thoughts exist when that space has become conscious of itself.

First Sight means you can see what really is there, and Second Thoughts mean thinking about what you are thinking. And in Tiffany's case, there were sometimes Third Thoughts and Fourth Thoughts although these...sometimes led her to walk into doors.

There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don't feel the same.

Even now when I am answering a question I am at the height of my own meditation.

I have no inner monologue.

Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.

I find that when I do not think of myself I do not think at all.

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

Every thought is an afterthought.

I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.

A conscious mind is a mind with a self in it.

I am unable, when I turn to myself, to recognize any of my faculties or my capacities. The inner sensation which I have of myself informs me that I am, that I think, that I will, that I have sensory awareness, that I suffer, and so on; but it provides me with no knowledge whatever of what I am - of the nature of my thought, my sensations, my passions, or my pain - or the mutual relations that obtain between all these things ... I have no idea whatever of my soul.

It's just a constant thing when the mind starts to wake up to itself.

Every one of us is the sum total of his own thoughts

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

Self-awareness includes awareness of your mental realm, which encompasses your thoughts, feelings, energy, and emotions.

What would it be like if, right in the midst of this busyness, we were to consciously take our hands off the controls? What if we were to intentionally stop our mental computations and our rushing around and, for a minute or two, simply pause and notice our inner experience?

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.

No one knows more about the way you think than you do.

Whatever a monk keeps pursuing with his thinking and pondering, that becomes the inclination of his awareness.