Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

L’homme n’est qu’un roseau, le plus faible de la nature, mais c’est un roseau pensant .

[ Socrates speaking :] Life without this sort of examination is not worth living.

Man, is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering.

If anyone was looking for me I hid behind a tree and cried out “I am an orphan.” And here I am, the center of all beauty! writing these poems! Imagine!

I am commencing an undertaking, hitherto without precedent, and which will never find an imitator. I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of a man in all the truth of nature, and that man myself.

To recognize that the soul of a man is unknowable is the ultimate achievement of Wisdom. The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in a balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?

There is no God, no universe, no humanrace, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought —a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlornamong the empty eternities!

The mind is a city like London, Smoky and populous: it is a capital Like Rome, ruined and eternal, Marked by the monument which no one Now remembers.

O seasons, O châteaux, What soul is without flaws? 12

We are, I am, you are

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.

And one trembles to be so understood and, at last, To understand, as if to know became The fatality of seeing things too well.

The mind ought sometimes to be diverted, that it may return the better to thinking.

Genius too does nothing but learn first how to lay bricks then how to build, and continually seek for material and continually form itself around it.Every activity of man is amazingly complicated, not only that of the genius: but none is a ‘miracle.

I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming. . . . This all sounds very strenuous and serious. But now that I have wrestled with it, it’s no longer so. I feel happy—deep down.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

Can I ever know you or you know me?

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,

One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person, Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.

But there are moments which he calls his own,

 

Who reflects too much will accomplish little.

 

We keep coming back and coming back To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns That fall upon it out of the wind.

The pebble is a perfect creature equal to itself mindful of its limits filled exactly with a pebbly meaning

The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss— an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.—is sure to be noticed.