Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

The discovery of truth by slow, progressive meditation is talent. Intuition of the truth, not preceded by perceptible meditation, is genius.

Believe me, every heart has his secret sorrows which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad.

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.

Solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company.

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.

We do not deal much in fact when we are contemplating ourselves.

We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.

Self -deception once yielded to, all other deceptions follow naturally more and more.

The self is merely the lens through which we see others and the world, and if this lens is not clear of distortions, we cannot perceive others.

There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.

The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss— an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.—is sure to be noticed.

There is no such flatterer as is a man’s self.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

It is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin; another’s voice; another’s soul.

You start a question, and it’s like starting a stone. You sit quietly on top of a hill; and the stone goes, starting others.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others.

A sudden, bold, and unexpected question doth many times surprise a man and lay him open.

To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention— on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God— that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying.

Most people live . . . in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness . . . much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.

The struggle is to synchronize the potential being with the actual being, to make a fruitful liaison between the man of yesterday and the man of tomorrow.

We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.

We should often feel ashamed of our best actions if the world could see all of the motives which produced them.