We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of self. And yet, curiously, most of us find that dungeon inhabited by someone else — something larger than we intended.

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full. A thought is a substitute for everything, and to exchange one's self for it is to lose everything.

The thing about man is that he knows what he is only after he has wasted most of what he had. Self-knowledge is the end of man, not his beginning; we arrive at it as exiles return to a country they have never seen.

We are always in our own company. Sometimes I feel I could tear myself open, not out of pain, but out of curiosity.

We are always in our own company. A man must know how to be alone, even in a crowd, even in a vast solitude; for what we seek in others is ourselves, and what we find is our own reflection.

We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of self. More and more, I suspect that solitude, which is the dungeon, contains also within it the key to its own liberation.

It is not by lying still in the dark and letting himself be gnawed that a man finds rest; but by watching over himself, and bravely bearing the strokes of existence.

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 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 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.

We are dying from overthinking. We are slowly killing ourselves by drowning in our thoughts. We confuse ourselves as we think in circles, going nowhere—all the while forgetting that we are only ever just one step away from making a choice that could change the direction of our lives.

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Lay It Down

Take this moment to decide if we meant it, if we tried, or felt around for far too much from things that accidentally touched.

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.