Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

We can understand almost anything, but we can't understand how we understand.

Convictions are prisons.

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience.

 

It is better to have a line drawn somewhere in the penumbra between darkness and light, than to remain in uncertainty.

 

The tragedy of a man who has found himself out.

 

If you direct your whole thought to work itself, none of the things which invade eyes or ears will reach the mind.

[I]n the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.

All uncertainty is fruitful ... so long as it is accompanied by the wish to understand.

In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists.

Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling.

There is one disadvantage which the man of philosophical habits of mind suffers, as compared with the man of action. While he is talcing an enlarged and rational view of the matter before him, he lets his chance slip through his fingers.

We find it hard to get and to keep any private property in thought. Other people are all the time saying the same things we are hoarding to say when we get ready.

Taste is the fundamental quality which sums up all other qualities. It is the ne plus ultra of the intelligence.

Thinking is hard work. One can’t bear burdens and ideas at the same time.

Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.

Nothing is so frequent as to mistake an ordinary human gift for a special and extraordinary endowment.

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

One has to dismount from an idea, and get into the saddle again, at every parenthesis.

Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull.

We don’t know each other’s secrets quite so well as we flatter ourselves we do. We don’t always know our own secrets as well as we might.

Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.

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

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.