Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

He [Hercule Poirot] tapped his forehead.

My mistakes are my life.

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.

The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is.

I am a part of all I have seen.

Great souls suffer in silence.

 

The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window.

I believe we shall come to care about people less and less. The more people one knows the easier it becomes to replace them.

Witness at all times. If necessary, use words. St.

For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.

All men think all men mortal but themselves.

When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.

Man never knows what he wants; he aspires to penetrate mysteries and as soon as he has, wants to re-establish them. Ignorance irritates him and knowledge cloys.

The good painter must paint two things: a person and the essence of his soul.

Prosperity knits a man to the world. He thinks he's 'finding his place in it,' while really it is finding its place in him.

I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me a bit.

Writers who get written about become self-conscious. They develop a regrettable habit of looking at themselves through the eyes of other people. They are no longer alone, they have an investment in critical praise, and they think they must protect it. This leads to a diffusion of effort. The writer watches himself as he works. He grows more subtle and he pays for it by loss of organic dash.

Others apart sat on a hill retir’d, In thoughts more elevate, and reason’d high Of Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, Fix’d fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, And found no end, in wand’ring mazes lost.

That day she put our heads together, Fate had her imagination about her, Your head so much concerned with outer, Mine with inner, weather.

It is an observation no less just than common, that there is no stronger test of a man’s real character than power and authority, exciting, as they do, every passion, and discovering every latent vice.

It is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin; another’s voice; another’s soul.

The more you listen to the voice within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside.

We are all born originals. Why is it so many of us die copies?

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.