Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

You, who have gotten under the skin of so many people and, indeed, of humanity, have had no occasion to slip under mine.

Although he knew who he was; although he was aware of his celebrity, he always took it with humor and always laughed at it and at himself.

I admit that thoughts influence the body.

It is better for people to be like the beasts… They should be more intuitive; they should not be too conscious of what they are doing while they are doing it.

Autobiographies mostly arise out of narcissism or negative feelings toward others. Biographies from the pen of another person tend in their psychological traits to reflect the intellectual and spiritual nature of the writer more than that of the person portrayed.

Like the man in the fairytale who turned everything he touched into gold, so with me everything is turned into newspaper clamor.

In the past it never occurred to me that every casual remark of mine would be snatched up and recorded. Otherwise I would have crept further into my shell.

You are surprised, aren’t you, at the contrast between my fame throughout the world… and the isolation and quiet in which I live here. I wished for this isolation all my life, and now I have finally achieved it here in Princeton.

I have never lost an obstinate sense of detachment, of the need for solitude—a feeling which increases over the years.

Why is it that nobody understands me, yet everybody likes me?

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.

Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

A reasoning, self-sufficing thing,

But for those obstinate questionings

As an experience, madness is terrific … and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about.

Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.

The world is everything that is the case.

Do you want to know the great drama of my life? It’s that I have put my genius into my life; all I’ve put into my works is my talent.

Do I contradict myself?

I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they.

Humour is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity.

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.

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