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 human mind is a dark forest, full of wild life and monsters. We do not know what we are, we can only see small lights in the forest of our unconsciousness, as it were luminous, phosphorescent flowers and night-blossoms.

The human mind is a dark forest, full of wild life and monsters. We do not know what is in there. We do not know how we think.

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One.

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.

Man can embed himself in history only by understanding the way his ancestors embedded themselves in it; but he can understand his ancestors only by re-creating their experiments in his own mind and life.