Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

Healthy introspection, without undermining oneself; it is a rare gift to venture into the unexplored depths of the self, without delusions or fictions, but with an uncorrupted gaze.

Be careful when you cast out your demons that you don’t throw away the best of yourself.

Knowing one's 'individuality'. - We are too prone to forget that in the eyes of people who are seeing us for the first time we are something quite different from what we consider ourselves to be: usually we are nothing more than a single individual trait which leaps to the eye and determines the whole impression that we make.

One is fruitful only at the cost of being rich in contradictions.

What you possess in the world will be found at the day of your death to belong to someone else. But what you are will be yours forever.

The brain's transmutation begins when consciousness understands that it made everything up – morality, good and bad, redemption and the truth. With this understanding, it realizes that now it can start anew.

We have to cease to think, if we refuse to do it in the prison house of language; for we cannot reach further than the doubt which asks whether the limit we see is really a limit.

If you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past!

 

But what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry.

 

The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It isabout simple awareness—awareness of what isso real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water.”

A good painter has two main objects to paint, man and the intention of his soul. The former is easy, the latter hard as he has to represent it by the attitude and movement of the limbs.

The only living language is the language in which we think and have our being.

No one can shed light on vices he does not have or afflictions he has never experienced.

The longer we live, the more we find we are like other persons.

Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.

Once you transcend the external differences, anything can be merged with anything.

One can have no more mastery over the environment, than one has over himself.

The only condition of peace in this world is to have no ideas, or, at least, not to express them.

It is useful to constantly observe, note, and consider.

If you can dispense with reputation, then you are free from care. Reputation is only a visitor, but reality is here to stay.

What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself.

We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.

I am only human, although I regret it.