Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

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

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

If you want to know yourself, Just look how others do it; If you want to understand others, Look into your own heart.

 

The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself.

Let your mind wander in simplicity, blend your spirit with the vastness, follow along with things the way they are, and make no room for personal views - then the world will be governed.

It is not what he has, or even what he does which expresses the worth of a man, but what he is.

Action is only coarsened thought-thought becomes concrete, obscure, and unconscious.

I have said that the soul is not more than the body, And I have said that the body is not more than the soul, And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is, And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.

Intellectuel = celui qui se dédouble.

Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumor, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact.

an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.

Autobiographies mostly arise out of narcissism or negative feelings toward others. Biographies from the pen of another person tend in their psychological traits to reflect the intellectual and spiritual nature of the writer more than that of the person portrayed.

A GOOD NOVEL TELLS US THE TRUTH ABOUT ITS HERO; BUT A BAD NOVEL TELLS US THE TRUTH ABOUT ITS AUTHOR.

Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life but that it bothers him less and less.

The writer of good will carries a lamp to illuminate the dark corners. Only that, nothing more—a tiny beam of light to show some hidden aspect of reality.

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?

What the heart knows today, the head will understand tomorrow.

What is familiar is what we are used to; and what we are used to is most difficult to 'Know' - that is, to see as a problem; that is, to see as strange, as distant, as 'outside us'.

Good government is no substitute for self-government.

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