Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.

JE est un autre .

We are, I am, you are

In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself.

[ Socrates speaking :] Let us suppose that every mind contains a kind of aviary stocked with birds of every sort, some in flocks apart from the rest, some in small groups, and some solitary, flying in any direction among them all. . . . When we are babies we must suppose this receptacle empty, and take the birds to stand for pieces of knowledge. Whenever a person acquires any piece of knowledge and shuts it up in his enclosure, we must say he has learned or discovered the thing of which this is the knowledge, and that is what “knowing” means.

[ Socrates speaking :] Picture men dwelling in a sort of subterranean cavern with a long entrance open to the light on its entire width. . . . Like to us. . . . Tell me do you think that these men would have seen anything of themselves or of one another except the shadows cast from the fire on the wall of the cave that fronted them?

[ Socrates speaking :] If men learn this [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. . . . And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.

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

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.

Yes, but haven’t you perceived that it isn’t possible to live in front of a mirror which not only freezes us with the image of ourselves, but throws our likeness back at us with a horrible grimace?

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

If you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.

Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.

It is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations .

Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him.

I am myself the matter of my book.

I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, and ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray.

The public . . . demands certainties. . . . But there are no certainties.

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks . . . strike, strike through the mask!

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.

How much truth can a spirit bear, how much truth can a spirit dare? ... that became for me more and more the real measure of value.

It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.

This I know - that I know nothing.

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.