Imaginary Discussion Thread on: Consciousness

The sensitivity of man to trifles, and his insensibility to great things, indicates a strange inversion.
- Pascal

I do not know the man so bold
He dare in lonely Place
That awful stranger Consciousness
Deliberately face.
- Emily Dickinson

If we had keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
- George Eliot

The heart that is soonest awake to the flowers
Is always the first to be touched by the thorns.
- Thomas Moore

The ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it.
- Lewis Mumford

I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something higher than a natural state.
- James Baldwin

[Man’s] soul longs for beauty, for the absolute, the transcendental. When he attains it, he has no use for it; it oppresses him.
- Maurice Valency

The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.
- W. H. Auden

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
- Shelley

Teach me, like you, to drink creation whole
And, casting out my self, become a soul.

- Richard Wilbur