Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

We can understand almost anything, but we can't understand how we understand.

Convictions are prisons.

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

It is the peculiarity of the bore that he is the last person to find himself out.

Not only does democracy make everyman forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens to the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

But, once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!

If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience.

 

It is better to have a line drawn somewhere in the penumbra between darkness and light, than to remain in uncertainty.

 

The tragedy of a man who has found himself out.

 

If you direct your whole thought to work itself, none of the things which invade eyes or ears will reach the mind.

[I]n the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.

In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists.

All uncertainty is fruitful ... so long as it is accompanied by the wish to understand.

Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling.

We find it hard to get and to keep any private property in thought. Other people are all the time saying the same things we are hoarding to say when we get ready.

There is one disadvantage which the man of philosophical habits of mind suffers, as compared with the man of action. While he is talcing an enlarged and rational view of the matter before him, he lets his chance slip through his fingers.

Thinking is hard work. One can’t bear burdens and ideas at the same time.

Nothing is so frequent as to mistake an ordinary human gift for a special and extraordinary endowment.

Taste is the fundamental quality which sums up all other qualities. It is the ne plus ultra of the intelligence.

One has to dismount from an idea, and get into the saddle again, at every parenthesis.

Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull.

We don’t know each other’s secrets quite so well as we flatter ourselves we do. We don’t always know our own secrets as well as we might.