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At times I want to be found.
 
Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.
 
In truth you owe naught to any man. You owe all to all men.
 
The more you know yourself, the more clarity there is. Self-knowledge has no end - you don't come to an achievement, you don't come to a conclusion. It is an endless river.
 
One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own nasty way.
 
What one does, one becomes.
 
Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.
 
The neurosis in which the search for safety takes its clearest form is in the compulsive-obsessive neurosis. Compulsive- obsessives try frantically to order and stabilize the world so that no unmanageable, unexpected or unfamiliar dangers will ever appear.
 
Much more than our other needs and endeavors, it is sexuality that puts us on an even footing with our kind: the more we practice it, the more we become like everyone else: it is in the performance of a reputedly bestial function that we prove our status as citizens: nothing is more public than the sexual act.
 
We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!
 
Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.
 
In strong wind, even turkeys can fly.
 
They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.
 
The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next. 
 
We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.
 
The only profitable conversations are with enthusiasts who have ceased being so, with the ex-naïve. Calmed down at last, they have taken, willy-nilly, the decisive step toward knowledge, that impersonal version of disappointment.
 
There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance-that principle is contempt prior to investigation.
 
...parental outbursts of rage or threats of punishment directed to the child, calling him names, speaking to him harshly, shaking him, handling him roughly, or actual physical punishment sometimes elicit such total panic and terror in the child that we must assume more is involved than the physical pain alone.
 
All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.
 
The process of comparison and condemnation prevents you from observing, studying. So a real student is one who observes everything in life, outwardly as well as inwardly, without comparing, approving, or condemning.
 
2723 quotes