Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

The greatest religion is to be true to your own nature. Have faith in yourselves.

Religion consists of a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain.

When two people decide to get a divorce, it isn't a sign that they "don't understand" one another, but a sign that they have, at last, begun to.

Perhaps love is the process of my leading you gently back to yourself.

Good government is no substitute for self-government.

I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life.

The first duty of a man is to think for himself.

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience ultimately one must have one's experiences in common.

The world itself is the will to power - and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power - and nothing else!

It is true, there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed. We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off.

We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge--and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves--how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?

Sleeping is no mean art. For its sake one must stay awake all day.

Never to talk of oneself is a form of hypocrisy.

One is healthy when one can laugh at the earnestness and zeal with which one has been hypnotized by any single detail of one's life.

In the true man there is a child concealed - who wants to play.

What is it: is man only a blunder of God or God only a blunder of man?

What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb?

Be careful when you cast out your demons that you don’t throw away the best of yourself.

And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourself, you do not yet belong with us.

I am a wanderer and mountain-climber, said he to his heart, I love not the plains, and it seemeth I cannot long sit still.And whatever may still overtake me as fate and experience—a wandering will be therein, and a mountain-climbing: in the end one experienceth only oneself.

Perhaps he even needs to have been a critic and a sceptic and a dogmatist and an historian, and in addition a poet and collector and traveller and puzzle-solver and moralist and seer and ‘free spirit’ and nearly all things, so that he can traverse the range of human values and value-feelings and be able to look with many kinds of eyes and consciences from the heights into every distance, from the depths into every height, from the corners into every wide expanse.

Oh, my friends, that your self be in your deed as the mother is in her child - let that be your word concerning virtue!