Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

When he was reading, he drew his eyes along over the leaves, and his heart searched into the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent.

Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.

Some thirty inches from my nose

To us he is no more a person

Resolve to be thyself: and know, that he Who finds himself, loses his misery.

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work … I want to achieve it through not dying.

If we may believe our logicians, man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter.

Compare yourself to those who are superior to you, and you’ll find yourself lacking; compare yourself to those who are inferior to you, and you’ll find yourself more than good enough.

One can know the world without going outside. One can see the Way of Heaven without looking out the window.

The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.

The human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still voice of conscience.

I will not let anyone walk through my mind with dirty feet.

Every one of us must find his peace from within. And peace, to be real, must be unaffected by outside circumstance.

Be congruent, be authentic, be your true self.

As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the atomic age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well.

A man is but the product of his thoughts; what he thinks, he becomes.

SPIRIT RULES SECRETLY ALONE THE BODY ACHIEVES NOTHING is something you know instinctively at fourteen and can still remember even with hell in your head at sixteen.

And if my thought-dreams could be seen They’d probably put my head in a guillotine But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life and life only

I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind.

Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumor, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact.

If anyone was looking for me I hid behind a tree and cried out “I am an orphan.” And here I am, the center of all beauty! writing these poems! Imagine!

Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.

The pebble is a perfect creature equal to itself mindful of its limits filled exactly with a pebbly meaning