Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,

Teach me, my God and King,

I am the family face;

I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should.

Just trust yourself and you’ll learn the art of living.

We dance round in a ring and suppose,

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

I am the doubter and the doubt.

Human kind

‘Character’ says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms—‘character is destiny.’

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.

But I can’t think for you

He needed not the spectacles of books to read Nature: he looked inwards, and found her there.

‘That was the curious incident,’ remarked Sherlock Holmes.

You see, but you do not observe.

A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.

I throw myself down in my Chamber, and I call in, and invite God, and his Angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his Angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door.