We live, as we dream — alone. While the dream disappears, the life continues painfully.

We are compelled to feel that the world presented to our senses is not the world as it really is, but only the world as it appears to beings constituted as we are. The thing in itself remains forever unknowable.

The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it in the same stone, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.

The true paradox of consciousness is that the more we know of ourselves, the more we become strangers to ourselves; for knowledge itself is a kind of forgetting—we lose the immediate simplicity of mere being in the complications of understanding what we are.

The mind is like a river. While it flows, it is never the same water; and while it thinks, it is never the same thought.

We are not thinking enough about thinking, and hardly thinking at all about awareness. Hardly thinking—which is the core of the matter.

The true paradox of consciousness is that we are never more fully ourselves than when we have forgotten ourselves—and this forgetting is not a loss but a gain, for in losing the boundary of self we touch something universal.

The eye is not merely a physical organ, but the supreme instrument of the mind; it is the only sense that can perceive beauty, and beauty is the only thing that makes life worth living.

The true paradox of consciousness is that we become most fully conscious precisely at those moments when we forget ourselves—when we are absorbed in something other than our own ego.

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often. Yet one cannot stop from living in the world. This is the paradox of consciousness itself—that we become most fully alive precisely through our capacity to suffer.

The eye is not merely a physical organ, but the supreme instrument of touch, and we see only with our eyes open to the world; blindness is not the absence of sight but the refusal to look.

I conceive a man's body as a sort of fiery mist enmeshed in the cage of the skeleton, and mostly resulting from the circulation of the blood.

The true paradox of consciousness is that we become most fully conscious precisely when we lose the sense of being conscious at all, when the instrument becomes so perfectly attuned to its object that subject and object merge into one continuous act of perception.

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole.

The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past, all the future, all the possibilities of existence.

The true paradox of consciousness is that we become most fully conscious precisely when we cease to be aware of ourselves—when the self dissolves into action, perception, or creation.

The mind of man is capable of anything because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.

The true paradox of consciousness is that we become most fully conscious precisely when we cease to think about consciousness at all, and surrender ourselves to the world.

The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What he has to do is to accept it or reject it, take it or leave it.

The mind itself is the seat of action. We do not act because we think, but we think because we act.

We are made of starstuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. We have come from the interstellar medium and into the form of conscious beings able to ask the supreme questions.

The true paradox of consciousness is that the more narrowly we examine it, the more it seems to elude us, as if consciousness were not an object to be grasped but a field in which the grasping occurs.

The purpose of consciousness is to orchestrate behavior, and consciousness succeeds brilliantly at this task when it stays in the background, when it doesn't interfere with the smooth operation of the automatic processes that have been honed by natural selection.

The true paradox of consciousness is that it cannot be fully grasped by introspection alone; the observer is always part of the observed, creating an irreducible gap between the thinking subject and its own thought.

The true paradox of consciousness is that the more we think about it directly, the more it eludes us; yet in the very act of eluding our grasp, it reveals itself most fully.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are peculiarly sensitive to their presence, and which, once awakened, work and grow by exercise. Our forefathers had convictions; we have only opinions.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and tend to ignore the rest, and all the phenomena thus ignored are as if non-existent for the mind. The consequence is that the mind, by the mere fact of attending to a limited set of phenomena, creates, in a sense, a limited world.

The true paradox of the human condition is that we are simultaneously utterly insignificant and infinitely precious—strangers to the universe yet the only part of it that knows itself.

The mind is like a vast library in which the books are in constant flux—some volumes fade into obscurity while others suddenly illuminate corners previously left in shadow, and the librarian himself is often the last to know what treasures or horrors his collection contains.

The human species is engaged in the act of creating itself. We are shaping our own evolution through the choices we make, yet we proceed as though we were merely passive observers of our own development.

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.

The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.