Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

The mind, ever the willing servant, will respond to boldness, for boldness, in effect, is a command to deliver mental resources.

Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradles. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

I LOVE SHERLOCK HOLMES. MY LIFE IS SO UNTIDY AND HE’S SO NEAT.

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world.

NO MAN KNOWS HE IS YOUNG WHILE HE IS YOUNG.

If the imagination is to yield any real product, it must have received a great deal of material from the external world.

Mens sana in corpore sano is a foolish saying. The sound body is a product of the sound mind.

Authorship of any sort is a fantastic indulgence of the ego.

To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention— on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God— that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying.

We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.

There is no such flatterer as is a man’s self.

Associate reverently and as much as you can with your loftiest thoughts.

The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life.

Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practised at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.

Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.

our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover.

Man is a being in search of meaning.

We are like people looking for something they have in their hands all the time; we're looking in all directions except at the thing we want, which is probably why we haven't found it.

Those who have knowledge are more confident than those who have no knowledge, and they are more confident after they have learned than before.

I must go beyond the dark world of sense information to the clear brilliance of the sunlight of the outside world. Once done, it becomes my duty to go back to the cave in order to illuminate the minds of those imprisoned in the ‘darkness’ of sensory knowledge.

Justice, although it resembles a mirage, is really concerned with internal rather than external activity, with the true self and its business.

A sensible man will remember that the eyes may be confused in two ways - by a change from light to darkness or from darkness to light; and he will recognize that the same thing happens to the soul.