Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

Man, is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering.

Great events make me quiet and calm; it is only trifles that irritate my nerves.

 

Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage. William S.

You cannot condemn a man for what may only be a figment of your own imagination.

Witness at all times. If necessary, use words. St.

Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.

The difficulty in life is the choice.

 

Can I ever know you or you know me?

Trust yourself. Think for yourself. Act for yourself. Speak for yourself. Be yourself. Imitation is suicide.

The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

 

I am a part of all I have seen.

For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.

What about the creative state? In it a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach.

We are all visionaries, and what we see is our soul in things.

Man cannot live without some vision of himself. But still less can he live with a vision that is not true to his inner experience and inner feeling.

One should stick by one’s own soul, and by nothing else. In one’s soul, one knows the truth from the untruth, and life from death. And if one betrays one’s own soul-knowledge, one is the worst of traitors.

Sin is a queer thing. It isn’t the breaking of divine commandments. It is the breaking of one’s own integrity.

The center of the universe is still the self.

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art.

Character is what you know you are, not what others think you have.

Remember, we learn nothing by speaking.

We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves.

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.