Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.

The writer of good will carries a lamp to illuminate the dark corners. Only that, nothing more—a tiny beam of light to show some hidden aspect of reality.

I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself.

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

Nobody sees with his eyes alone; we see with our souls.

Authorship of any sort is a fantastic indulgence of the ego.

Everyone has his vanity, and each one’s vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view— until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.

All persons are puzzles until at last we find in some word or act the key to the man, to the woman; straightway all their past words and actions lie in light before us.

We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.

The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own.

No one has ever taken the trouble to stretch and carry his understanding as far as it could go.

Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.

Associate reverently and as much as you can with your loftiest thoughts.

This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.

One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.

At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: “ This is the real me!”

When the mind is thinking, is it simply talking to itself, asking questions and answering them, and saying yes or no.

What’s a man’s first duty? The answer’s brief: to be himself.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk.

Thinking is the endeavor to capture reality by the means of ideas.

Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.

To think and to be fully alive are the same.

As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.