Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience.

 

It is better to have a line drawn somewhere in the penumbra between darkness and light, than to remain in uncertainty.

 

In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists.

“Each man’s soul is his genius.”

Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull.

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.

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

[I]n the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

If you direct your whole thought to work itself, none of the things which invade eyes or ears will reach the mind.

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

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

 

One has to dismount from an idea, and get into the saddle again, at every parenthesis.

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.

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.

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

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.

There is one disadvantage which the man of philosophical habits of mind suffers, as compared with the man of action. While he is talcing an enlarged and rational view of the matter before him, he lets his chance slip through his fingers.

We don’t know each other’s secrets quite so well as we flatter ourselves we do. We don’t always know our own secrets as well as we might.

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.

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

Crises of expression and spasms of eros: that’s the man of today, the inside a vacuum, the continuity of personality provided by his suit, which with stout cloth might be good for ten years.

Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.

How should I know what I’ll be, I who don’t know what I am? Be what I think? But I think of being so many things! And there are so many who think of being the same thing that we can’t all be it! Genius? At this moment A hundred thousand brains are dreaming they’re geniuses like me, And it may be that history won’t remember even one, All their imagined conquests amounting to so much dung.