Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

Who shall say I am not

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did, end anyone and hacks her body up and hide the pieces, where they may be found. He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing. Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up. Nobody is ever missing.

I confess freely to you, I could never look long upon a monkey, without very mortifying reflections.

FASHION IS WHAT YOU ADOPT WHEN YOU DON’T KNOW WHO YOU ARE.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you somebody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Who knows whether living is dying, and breathing Is eating, and sleeping is a wool blanket?

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.

A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true.

The readiest and surest way to get rid of censure, is to correct ourselves.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

 

Total grandeur of a total edifice, Chosen by an inquisitor of structures For himself. He stops upon this threshold As if the design of all his words takes form And frame from thinking and is realized.

And moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored means you have no

Je pense, donc je suis.

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

Nine times out of ten, the first thing a man’s companion knows of his shortcomings is from his apology.

Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle—they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisivemoments.

The difficulty in life is the choice.