We live, as we dream — alone; and what we hope for, what we think we know — of ourselves, of others — is in truth only the dream of a dreamer.

A man's character is his fate. And yet we spend our lives constructing masks so elaborate that we forget the face beneath them — until sorrow strips it bare, and we meet ourselves for the first time.

The universe is not outside of you. Look inside yourself; everything that you want, you already are. But do not mistake this for comfort — it is the heaviest burden a man can carry, to be the sole author of his own becoming.

No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge. The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.

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.

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.

Every invalid is a physician. What does it matter that his prescriptions are all for himself?

The observations of others, even our nearest and dearest, are usually quite wide of the mark; and even if they do occasionally hit it, the shot is apt to be more painful than profitable.

We are ruined, not by what we really want, but by what we think we do; therefore never go abroad in search of your wants; if they be real wants, they will come home in search of you.

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.

It is not the magnitude of our actions but the place they fill in our life that makes them great or small. Obscurity enlarges objects; and great men are not always such in the eyes of their valets.

It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners — yet what is health but the name we give to our present ignorance of what ails us?

The universe is not outside of you. Look inside yourself; everything that you want, you already are.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

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.