Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that he does not become one himself. And when you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

The brain may take advice, but not the heart.

For what is enthusiasm but the oblivion and swallowing-up of self in an object dearer than self?

In the drowsy dark caves of the mind dreams build their nest with fragments dropped from day’s caravan.

No man is defeated without until he has first been defeated within.

What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but absence of self-criticism.

Conscience is a man’s compass, and though the needle sometimes deviates, though one often perceives irregularities in directing one’s course by it, still one must try to follow its direction.

Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

Conscience is thoroughly well-bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it

What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.

We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.

I have bought this wonderful machine—a computer. Now I am rather an authority on gods, so I identified the machine— it seems to me to be an Old Testament god with a lot of rules and no mercy.

To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience.

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.

Character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life— is the source from which self-respect springs.

The brain is like a muscle. When we think well, we feel good.

It is good to rub and polish our brains against that of others.

The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around.

I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.

Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also.

We visit bookshops not so often to buy any one special book, but rather to rediscover, in the happier and more expressive words of others, our own encumbered soul.

An action is the perfection and publication of thought.

My own education operated by a succession of eye-openers each involving the repudiation of some previously held belief.