“Illness is a part of every human being’s experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals.”

Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure.

I feel all shadows of the universe multiplied deep inside my skin.

For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.

In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.

It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.

I have lost friends, some by death, others by sheer inability to cross the street.

I like going from one lighted room to another, such is my brain to me; lighted rooms.

Intimacy is a difficult art.

They went in and out of each other’s minds without any effort.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time.

Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy.

Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.

Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words.

No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.

We – mankind – stand at the center of an evolutionary crisis, with a new evolutionary device – our consciousness of the crisis – as our unique contribution.

There is nothing holier in this life of ours than the first consciousness of love, the first fluttering of its silken wings.

Now, what really makes a teacher is love for the human child; for it is love that transforms the social duty of the educator into the higher consciousness of a mission.

Birds and animals probably think without knowing that they think; that is, they have not self-consciousness.

I think that the important changes have already happened, changes in consciousness. It’s mostly a matter of everything else catching up to that.

An organism that survives well, there is really no need for consciousness in there.

What is life but being conscious? And good and evil are manifestations of consciousness. If you reject one, you’re not getting the whole thing that’s there to be had.

I never took hallucinogenic drugs because I never wanted my consciousness expanded one unnecessary iota.