Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

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.

Bores bore each other, too, but it never seems to teach them anything.

A bore is a fellow talker who can change the subject to his topic of conversation faster than you can change it back to yours.

It has amazed me that the most incongruous traits should exist in the same person and, for all that, yield a plausible harmony.

One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas—and you have to work through it all.

The truth about a man is, first of all, what it is that he keeps hidden.

Men show their character in nothing more clearly than by what they think laughable.

We know what a person thinks not when he tells us what he thinks, but by his actions.

What kind of man am I? One of those who would be pleased to be refuted if I say anything untrue, and who would be pleased to refute anyone who says anything untrue; one who, however, wouldn’t be any less pleased to be refuted than to refute. For I count being refuted a greater good, insofar as it is a greater good for oneself to be delivered from the worst thing there is than to deliver someone else from it.

We are like people looking for something they have in their hands all the time; we're looking in all directions except at the thing we want, which is probably why we haven't found it.

True opinions are a fine thing and do all sorts of good so long as they stay in their place; but they will not stay long. They run away from a man's mind, so they are not worth much until you tether them by working out the reason. Once they are tied down, they become knowledge, and are stable.

Those whose hearts are fixed on reality itself deserve the title of Philosophers.

Those who have knowledge are more confident than those who have no knowledge, and they are more confident after they have learned than before.

Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.

This feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy.

There's no chance of their having a conscious glimpse of the truth as long as they refuse to disturb the things they take for granted and remain incapable of explaining them. For if your starting point is unknown, and your end-point and intermediate stages are woven together out of unknown material, there may be coherence, but knowledge is completely out of the question.

The tools that would teach men their own use would be beyond price.

Man is a being in search of meaning.

Justice, although it resembles a mirage, is really concerned with internal rather than external activity, with the true self and its business.

It would be better for me that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself.

It is impossible to improve the world if first the man does not improve.

Is there any self-existent fire? and do all those things which we call self-existent exist? or are only those things which we see, or in some way perceive through the bodily organs, truly existent, and nothing whatever besides them? And is all that which we call an intelligible essence nothing at all, and only a name?

I thought to myself: I am wiser than this man; neither of us probably knows anything that is really good, but he thinks he has knowledge, when he has not, while I, having no knowledge, do not think I have.

I perplex others, not because I am clear, but because I am utterly perplexed myself.