Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

Men and women -- even man and wife are foreigners. Each has reserves that the other cannot enter into, nor understand. These have the effect of frontiers.

Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute.

The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.

Our sins are more easily remembered than our good deeds.

It takes a wise man to discover a wise man.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.

Learn what you are and be such.

Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

We may despair of knowing, we must not despair of judging.

The human brain is a complex organ with the wonderful power of enabling man to find reasons for continuing to believe whatever it is that he wants to believe.

O! what a noble mind is here o’erthrown: The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword.

By all means use sometimes to be alone.

I was all ear, And took in strains that might create a soul Under the ribs of Death.

Just trust yourself, then you will know how to live.

Two souls alas! dwell in my breast.

Nor less I deem that there are Powers Which of themselves our minds impress; That we can feed this mind of ours In a wise passiveness.

I pass, like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech; That moment that his face I see, I know the man that must hear me: To him my tale I teach.

I am a parcel of vain strivings tied By a chance bond together.

What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me.

The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work, And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.

The night can sweat with terror as before We pieced our thoughts into philosophy, And planned to bring the world under a rule, Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.

The Brain—is wider than the Sky— For—put them side by side— The one the other will contain With ease—and You—beside.