Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

Man is not truly one, but truly two.

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

The palm at the end of the mind,

Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

‘What is the answer?’ No answer came. She laughed and said, ‘In that case what is the question?’

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

Existence precedes and rules essence.

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.

The feast of reason and the flow of soul.

All our knowledge is, ourselves to know.

Created half to rise, and half to fall;

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;

Search then the Ruling Passion: There, alone,

The ruling passion, be it what it will,

Behold! human beings living in a underground den … Like ourselves … they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave.

Is there no way out of the mind?

Man is only a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.