Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.

’Tis the mind that makes the body rich.

Untilled soil, however fertile it may be, will bear thistles and thorns; and so it is with man’s mind.

Measure your mind’s height by the shade it casts.

A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.

We are, perhaps uniquely among the earth’s creatures, the worrying animal.

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.

Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties.

Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able . . . to keep myself company.

The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life.

What a lost person needs is a map of the territory . . . so he can see where he is in relation to everything else. Literature is not only a mirror; it is a map, a geography of the mind.

The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world.

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.

Born Originals , how comes it to pass that we die Copies ?

What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.

If a life can have a theme song, and I believe every worthwhile one has, mine is a religion, an obsession, or a mania or all of these expressed in one word: individualism.

an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.

If the imagination is to yield any real product, it must have received a great deal of material from the external world.

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.

Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.