Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

There is no one so bound to his own face that he does not cherish the hope of presenting another to the world.

It’s a burden to us even to be human beings—men with our own real body and blood; we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man.

Naked I came into the world, naked I shall go out of it! And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its colour.

“Each man’s soul is his genius.”

We are all visionaries, and what we see is our soul in things.

One should stick by one’s own soul, and by nothing else. In one’s soul, one knows the truth from the untruth, and life from death. And if one betrays one’s own soul-knowledge, one is the worst of traitors.

Character is what you know you are, not what others think you have.

Only connect! … Only connect the prose and the passion.

 

O may my heart’s truth

It is in sickness that we are compelled to recognize that we do not live alone but are chained to a being from a different realm, from whom we are worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. . . . To ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.

When two people decide to get a divorce, it isn't a sign that they "don't understand" one another, but a sign that they have, at last, begun to.

In the true man there is a child concealed - who wants to play.

Oh, my friends, that your self be in your deed as the mother is in her child - let that be your word concerning virtue!

You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles whe na carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself.Ina man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts. He can fall in love with an idea. An idea can make him ill.

Our faith in others betrays that we would rather have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend is our betrayer. And often with our love we want merely to overcome envy. And often we attack and make ourselves enemies, to conceal that we are vulnerable.

A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

Beauty is no quality in things themselves. It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.

Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.

In a crowd, on a journey at a banquet even, a line of thought can itself provide its own seclusion.

Man never knows what he wants; he aspires to penetrate mysteries and as soon as he has, wants to re-establish them. Ignorance irritates him and knowledge cloys.

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

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

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

Little-minded people’s thoughts move in such small circles that five minutes’ conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine their whole curve. An arc in the movement of a large intellect does not sensibly differ from a straight line.