Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

When the mind is thinking, is it simply talking to itself, asking questions and answering them, and saying yes or no.

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

What’s a man’s first duty? The answer’s brief: to be himself.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view— until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.

Those whose hearts are fixed on reality itself deserve the title of Philosophers.

A life without investigation is not worth living.

Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only a euphemism for folly.

Prejudice is opinion without judgement.

Beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may.

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

When you are sincerely pleased, you are nourished.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.... Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall off relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things.

The existence of forgetting has never been proved: we only know that some things do not come to our mind when we want them to.

At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.

Whatever they may think and say about their "egoism", the great majority nonetheless do nothing for their ego their whole life long: what they do is done for the phantom of their ego which has formed itself in the heads of those around them and has been communicated to them.

The first duty of a man is to think for himself.

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

To learn to see- to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to allow things to come up to it; to defer judgment, and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides. This is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality. One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts.

We no longer have a sufficiently high estimate of ourselves when we communicate. Our true experiences are not garrulous. They could not communicate themselves if they wanted to: they lack words. We have already grown beyond whatever we have words for. In all talking there lies a grain of contempt. Speech, it seems, was devised only for the average medium, communicable. The speaker has already vulgarized himself by speaking.

A well-constituted human being, a ‘happy one’, must perform certain actions and instinctively shrinks from other actions, he transports the order of which he is the physiological representative into his relations with other human beings and with things. In a formula: his virtue is the consequence of his happiness…Everything good is instinct—and consequently easy, necessary, free. Effort is an objection.

The major value in life is not what you get. The major value in life is what you become.

You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

Happiness lies in the consciousness we have of it.

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen .