Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

We are all something, but none of us are everything.

But often in the world’s most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life.

Not till the fire is dying in the grate, Look we for any kinship with the stars. Oh, wisdom never comes when it is gold, And the great price we pay for it full worth; We have it only when we are half earth.

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last instalment missing.

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

You see, but you do not observe.

I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.

‘What is the answer?’ No answer came. She laughed and said, ‘In that case what is the question?’

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems—but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems incredible.

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

Happiness depends more on the inward disposition of mind than on outward circumstances.

You only lose energy when life becomes dull in your mind. Your mind gets bored and therefore tired of doing nothing. Get interested in something! Get absolutely enthralled with something! Get out of yourself! Be somebody! Do something! The more you lose yourself in something bigger than yourself, the more energy you will have.

The secret of living is to find...the pivot of a concept on which you can make your stand.

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.

To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.

SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE ENEMY OF ALL ART, BE IT ACTING, WRITING, PAINTING, OR LIVING ITSELF, WHICH IS THE GREATEST ART OF ALL.

If a life can have a theme song, and I believe every worthwhile one has, mine is a religion, an obsession, or a mania or all of these expressed in one word: individualism.

Furthermore, we have not even to risk the journey alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.

We do not deal much in fact when we are contemplating ourselves.

A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.