Antonio Damasio Quotes

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

The human body is not the person. Identity is the way the brain operates; it's memories, it's sensory input and output. The mind is the person.

I suppose identity depends on memory. And if my memory is blotted out, then I wonder if I exist - I mean, if I am the same person. Of course, I don't have to solve that problem. It's up to God, if any.

Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?

Identity is memory; when memory disappears, the self dissolves and love with it.

As you you deeply into your own awareness, and relax the self-contraction, and dissolve into the empty ground of your own primordial experience, the simply feeling of Being-right now, right here-is it not obvious at once?

The self is known to every one but not clearly. You always exist.

We're a feeling, an awareness encased here

For a long time he had been white smoke. He did not realize that until he left the hospital, because white smoke had no consciousness of itself. It faded into the white world of their bed sheets and walls; it was sucked away by the words of doctors who tried to talk to the invisible scattered smoke... They saw his outline but they did not realize it was hollow inside.

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

I know myself as mortal, but this raises the question: "What is I?" Am I an individual, or am I an evolving life stream composed of countless selves?

How can you be that which you possess? You cannot be the horse and rider at the same time. Herein lies the secret of mortality and immortality.

I desire therefore I exist.

The self... is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented.

It's a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away.

pg 9, "The consciousness of life's unconsciousness is the oldest tax levied on the intelligence.

I am me, whatever that means. I am conscious.

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.

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

I'm not saying that people shouldn't go out to football games and drink beer and have a good time, I do it myself. But, at the same time, people are so apathetic and that shows me that they don't care about themselves. They have no self-image. Their image is projected to them via the television and that is where they make decisions about who they are according to what the public says they ought to be.

To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self.

The "ego" like its correlative "non-ego", is the product of the body, mind etc. The only proof of the existence of the real Self is realisation.

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

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?

We do not become. We simply are.