“In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness.”

A mode of being that the way of life about me had said could not be, must not be, and upon which the penalty of death had been placed.

Each day when you see us black folk upon the dusty land of your farm or upon the hard pavement of your city streets.

I endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning.

You usually take it for granted and think you know us, but our history is far stranger than you suspect, and we are not what we seem.

I could endure the hunger. I had learned to live with hate.

Don’t leave inferences to be drawn when evidence can be presented.

Hunger has always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at my gauntly.

Pity can purge us of hostility and arouse feelings of identification with the characters, but it can also be a consoling reassurance which leads us to believe that we have understood, and that, in pitying, we have even done something to right a wrong.

I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . .

It had been only through books-at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions-that I had managaed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way.

Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.

It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness

It made me love talk that sought answers to questions that could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling sense of wonder and awe in the face of the drama of human feeling which is hidden by the external drama of life.

Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.

Kill them, turn back time to the moment before I had talked so that I could have another chance to save myself.

He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer.

The task of science, therefore, is not to attack the objects of faith, but to establish the limits beyond which knowledge cannot go and found a unified self-consciousness within these limits.

The witness of the three states of consciousness [waking, dream and deep sleep] and of the nature of Existence-Consciousness-Bliss is the Self.

To be free from bondage the wise person must practise discrimination between One-Self and the ego-self. By that alone you will become full of joy, recognising Self as Pure Being, Consciousness and Bliss.

Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in eternal awareness or pure consciousness.

Thus one should know oneself to be of the nature of Existence-Consciousness-Bliss.

We are on the planet to wrap our consciousness around the divine treasure within us.

You are the light of consciousness and also the witness of this light. You are pure awareness.

Consciousness is the creative element in the universe. Without it, nothing would appear.