“The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind.”

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science.

Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.

Action on the move creates its own route, creates to a very great extent the conditions under which it is to be fulfilled and thus baffles all calculation.

We regard intelligence as man’s main characteristic and we know that there is no superiority which intelligence cannot confer on us, no inferiority for which it cannot compensate.

There is nothing [that] disarms us like laughter.

One can always reason with reason.

Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself.

We are free when our actions emanate from our total personality, when they express it, when they resemble it in the indefinable way a work of art sometimes does the artist.

When it is said that an object occupies a large space in the soul or even that it fills it entirely, we ought to understand by this simply that its image has altered the shade of a thousand perceptions or memories.

However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary.

If reality impacted directly on our senses and our consciousness, if we could have direct communication between the material world and ourselves, art would be unnecessary.

Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.

A situation is always comic if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.

Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division.

As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

A man’s hatred is always concentrated upon that which makes him conscious of his bad qualities.

I had a lot of resistance, and not just to fame. I was always conscious of not changing.

The quality of our life depends on the quality of the seeds that lie deep in our consciousness.

Protecting our future on this planet depends on the conscious evolution of our species.

Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor.

Enlightenment doesnt occur from sitting around visualizing images of light, but from integrating the darker aspects of the Self into the conscious personality.

But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.