Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.

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.

It is much more difficult to judge oneself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself rightly, then you are indeed a man of true wisdom.

She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.

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

Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, These three alone lead life to sovereign power.

 

In a crowd, on a journey at a banquet even, a line of thought can itself provide its own seclusion.

We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves.

What about the creative state? In it a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach.

There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know.

Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places of your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you. This before all: ask yourself in the quietest hour of your night: must I write?

We do not learn. And what we call learning is only a process of recollection.

If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself. If you are accompanied by even one companion you belong only half to yourself or even less in proportion to the thoughtlessness of his conduct and if you 45 have more than one companion you will fall more deeply into the same plight.

Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.

Labor is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul, Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

My secrets cry aloud. I have no need for tongue. My heart keeps open house, My doors are widely flung.

Teach me, my God and King,

I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.

The wisest is he that knows only that he knows nothing.

I have never lost an obstinate sense of detachment, of the need for solitude—a feeling which increases over the years.

In the past it never occurred to me that every casual remark of mine would be snatched up and recorded. Otherwise I would have crept further into my shell.

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.

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.