Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

I am I plus my surroundings, and if I do not preserve the latter I do not preserve myself.

I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Que sais-je?

When I play with my cat, who knows whether she isn’t amusing herself with me more than I am with her?

The first and wisest of them all professed

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.

Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul

Conscience: the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.

I do not know which makes a man more conservative—to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.

The mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, joy, set it free! The Story of My Life (1902) ch. 4

The only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up one’s mind about nothing—to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts. Not a select party.

Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

Mens sana in corpore sano.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.

Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

Language is the dress of thought.

Muero porque no muero.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

Before you judge me, try hard to love me, look within your heart

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.

Beauty is no quality in things themselves. It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.