Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.

This is the true measure of love: when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved so before us, and that no one will ever love in the same way after us.

The great charm in argument is really finding one’s own opinions, not other people’s .

The summit of happiness is reached when a person is ready to be what he is.

Give me the benefit of your convictions, if you have any; but keep your doubts to yourself, for I have enough of my own.

Men show their character in nothing more clearly than by what they think laughable.

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.

He who has attained the freedom of reason to any extent cannot, for a long time, regard himself otherwise than as a wanderer on the face of the earth - and not even as a traveler towards a final goal, for there is no such thing. But he certainly wants to observe and keep his eyes open to whatever actually happens in the world; therefore he cannot attach his heart too firmly to anything individual; he must have in himself something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transitoriness.

We have abolished the real world: what world is left? The apparent world perhaps? . . . But no! with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world.

A thinking man never be a party man.

It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.

No small art is it to sleep: it is necessary for that purpose to keep awake all day.

What we think we become.

Open you eyes, look within. Are you satisfied with the life you’re living.

One should hold fast one's heart; for when one letteth it go, how quickly doth one's head run away!

Religion consists of a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

We have to be careful that in throwing out the devil, we don't throw out the best part of ourselves.

There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks furtively to left and right, behind him and all about him. In the end such a man becomes impossible to get hold of, since he is wholly exterior, without kernel, a tattered, painted bag of clothes, a decked-out ghost that cannot inspire even fear and certainly not pity.

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.

It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.

This I know - that I know nothing.

The only source of knowledge is experience.

One has no right to love or hate anything if one has not acquired a thorough knowledge of its nature. Great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you know it but little you will be able to love it only a little or not at all.