Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

The only source of knowledge is experience.

You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

What you possess in the world will be found at the day of your death to belong to someone else. But what you are will be yours forever.

The major value in life is not what you get. The major value in life is what you become.

What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: Our life is the creation of our mind.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

The greatest religion is to be true to your own nature. Have faith in yourselves.

Religion consists of a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain.

Perhaps love is the process of my leading you gently back to yourself.

Good government is no substitute for self-government.

I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life.

The first duty of a man is to think for himself.

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience ultimately one must have one's experiences in common.

The world itself is the will to power - and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power - and nothing else!

It is true, there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed. We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off.

We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge--and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves--how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?

Sleeping is no mean art. For its sake one must stay awake all day.

Never to talk of oneself is a form of hypocrisy.

One is healthy when one can laugh at the earnestness and zeal with which one has been hypnotized by any single detail of one's life.

What is it: is man only a blunder of God or God only a blunder of man?

What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb?