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 most terrible thing about materialism is not that it assumes the world to be made of atoms, but that it assumes this ideal notion of material atoms to be something particularly scientific, particular real, or particularly philosophic.

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

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of things in the world—food, safety, beauty, knowledge—and the universe cooperates by containing those things. But there are other things in the universe that do not call to any instinct, that have no utility, that simply exist in their own right.

We are not the measure of all things. There is much in the world that is indifferent to human purposes, and this indifference is a kind of freedom—for us and for reality itself.

The paradox only disappears when we recognize that the contradictions of life are not errors to be eliminated but the very substance from which meaning emerges.

The particular has no power without the universal, and the universal has no meaning without the particular. We cannot live only by bread, nor only by beauty; we need both, and in the right proportion.