Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

When you are sincerely pleased, you are nourished.

Grown people know that they do not always know the way of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got the proof.

What we think we become.

Man is a universe within himself.

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.

To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.

How can we remember our ignorance, which our growth requires, when we are using our knowledge all the time?

A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.

He who experiences the unity of life sees his own self in all beings, and all beings in his own self, and looks on everything with an impartial eye.

In a word, neither death, nor exile, nor pain, nor anything of this kind is the real cause of our doing or not doing any action, but our inward opinions and principles.

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

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

This is the true measure of love: when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved so before us, and that no one will ever love in the same way after us.

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

It is easier to be wise for others than for ourselves.

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

What we do not understand we do not possess.

The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

Reason deceives us; conscience, never.

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.