Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself; to be conquered by yourself is of all things most shameful and vile.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

They please, are pleas’d, they give to get esteem, Till, seeming blest, they grow to what they seem. 2

We dance round in a ring and suppose, But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

A. A violent order is disorder; and B. A great disorder is an order. These Two things are one.

Every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay every thing open.

The inconceivable idea of the sun. You must become an ignorant man again And see the sun again with an ignorant eye And see it clearly in the idea of it.

Human kind

The first and wisest of them all professed

You are surprised, aren’t you, at the contrast between my fame throughout the world… and the isolation and quiet in which I live here. I wished for this isolation all my life, and now I have finally achieved it here in Princeton.

Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.

IF A WOMAN DOUBTS AS TO WHETHER SHE SHOULD ACCEPT A MAN OR NOT, SHE CERTAINLY OUGHT TO REFUSE HIM.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

WHAT EXACTLY DO I THINK ABOUT WHEN I’M RUNNING? I DON’T HAVE A CLUE.

What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.

A person's desires force him to something to reason and he berates himself and gets indignant with the part that forces him, and his spirit allies with reason as though reason and desire were at civil war.

Character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life— is the source from which self-respect springs.

The brain is like a muscle. When we think well, we feel good.

Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties.

The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.

The self is merely the lens through which we see others and the world, and if this lens is not clear of distortions, we cannot perceive others.

Most people live . . . in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness . . . much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.