Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

Thus I spoke, more and more softly; for I was afraid of my own thoughts and the thoughts behind my thoughts.

Every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus - you have to react, you follow every impulse.

Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?

The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is secure enough, fixed enough for it.

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? It has rightly been said: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also"; our treasure is where the beehives of our knowledge are.

The more thoroughly a person understands life, the less he will mock, though in the end he might still mock the "thoroughness of his understanding.

Three metamorphoses of the spirit have I designated to you: how the spirit became a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.

Their [philosophers] thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and a home-coming to a far-off, ancient common-household of the soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew: philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism of the highest order.

Because we have for millenia made moral, aesthetic, religious demands on the world, looked upon it with blind desire, passion or fear, and abandoned ourselves to the bad habits of illogical thinking, this world has gradually become so marvelously variegated, frightful, meaningful, soulful, it has acquired color - but we have been the colorists: it is the human intellect that has made appearances appear and transported its erroneous basic conceptions into things.

If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs.

I am one thing, my writings are another.

It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!

He who has attained the freedom of reason to any extent cannot, for a long time, regard himself otherwise than as a wanderer on the face of the earth - and not even as a traveler towards a final goal, for there is no such thing. But he certainly wants to observe and keep his eyes open to whatever actually happens in the world; therefore he cannot attach his heart too firmly to anything individual; he must have in himself something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transitoriness.

One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.

It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.

If we live truly, we shall see truly.

I’m not confused, I’m just well mixed.

Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.

The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.

Open you eyes, look within. Are you satisfied with the life you’re living.

Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

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

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.