Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

We visit bookshops not so often to buy any one special book, but rather to rediscover, in the happier and more expressive words of others, our own encumbered soul.

No one has ever taken the trouble to stretch and carry his understanding as far as it could go.

One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.

An action is the perfection and publication of thought.

Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.

Solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company.

That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.

I have bought this wonderful machine—a computer. Now I am rather an authority on gods, so I identified the machine— it seems to me to be an Old Testament god with a lot of rules and no mercy.

Talking much about oneself may be a way of hiding oneself.

To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience.

What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but absence of self-criticism.

The power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged. God has kept that good wine until now.

I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.

I must distinguish between that which always is and never becomes and which is apprehended by reason and reflection, and that which always becomes and never is and is conceived by opinion with the help of sense.

For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories.

All I really know is the extent of my own ignorance

There's no chance of their having a conscious glimpse of the truth as long as they refuse to disturb the things they take for granted and remain incapable of explaining them. For if your starting point is unknown, and your end-point and intermediate stages are woven together out of unknown material, there may be coherence, but knowledge is completely out of the question.

When one is out of touch with oneself, one cannot touch others.

How can we remember our ignorance, which our growth requires, when we are using our knowledge all the time?

The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.

It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!

The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is secure enough, fixed enough for it.

What we do not understand we do not possess.

He sees daily evidence that many things held to be true by nine-tenths of all men are, in reality, false, and he is thereby apt to acquire a doubt of everything, including his own beliefs.