Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

[ Socrates speaking :] Life without this sort of examination is not worth living.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

Yes, but haven’t you perceived that it isn’t possible to live in front of a mirror which not only freezes us with the image of ourselves, but throws our likeness back at us with a horrible grimace?

L’homme n’est qu’un roseau, le plus faible de la nature, mais c’est un roseau pensant .

If you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.

Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.

It is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations .

Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him.

I am myself the matter of my book.

I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, and ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray.

The public . . . demands certainties. . . . But there are no certainties.

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks . . . strike, strike through the mask!

I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming. . . . This all sounds very strenuous and serious. But now that I have wrestled with it, it’s no longer so. I feel happy—deep down.

How much truth can a spirit bear, how much truth can a spirit dare? ... that became for me more and more the real measure of value.

It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.

This I know - that I know nothing.

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.

To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

The only source of knowledge is experience.

You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

What you possess in the world will be found at the day of your death to belong to someone else. But what you are will be yours forever.

The major value in life is not what you get. The major value in life is what you become.

What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: Our life is the creation of our mind.