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From Watkins hardcover edition of 1958. Numbers refer to the page, an 'a' indicates the top half of the page, a 'b' the bottom half.
The only sanity lies in far and high vision.
Page 19b
Ask yourself sincerely: What do I want? Try to answer without self-criticism or sentiment. Learn to have confidence in the indications of conscience. When you have found in yourself a place of strength and security, guard it and establish yourself there.
Page 20a
It may sometimes be a bad fate to be a lady---but to be a woman, never! The only question is, what does it mean to be a woman? Evidently something very interesting indeed. But it means digging down very deep---giving up bad imitations of men's ideas, men's feelings and men's behavior. To be a woman is something very positive. And I can understand that 'to become a woman' might be quite a big aim, just as 'to become a man' can be. Any negative attitude toward one's sex is an obstacle to development, while a positive attitude towards it may bring quite extraordinary and unexpected things.
Page 30a
We used to think it was our hope that was imagination; we were quite wrong---it is our doubts and fears which are imaginary and unnecessary, and prevent us from understanding anything. Energy comes from above, not below---everything is in that.
Page 33b
I've come to the conclusion that if we can't express a thing in the simplest possible terms, we haven't really understood it.
Page 50b
It is very lucky to be an optimist. Though whether one is lucky because one is an optimist, or an optimist because one is lucky, I still don't know. In any case I am both in a superlative degree.
Page 143b
Preoccupation with one's weakness is the last form taken by self-importance.
Page 171b
We were in the Cathedral in Florence. You come in at the main door and there are all the people, priests, choir boys, tourists, milling about on the ground level. There each one seems important to himself and indeed he is. But then you painfully climb up a dark spiral stairway in the wall towards the dome, and at last come out in a gallery which runs round the inside of it. Suddenly, the whole church is spread out below you with all those tiny people indistinguishable one from another, and both you and they are equally lost in the great void which seems to make all one's previous thoughts disappear as pointless. Somehow this gallery seems to mean knowledge of oneself as one is, full self-consciousness.
But when one had watched as much as one could bear to, one plunged into a hidden staircase which climbed to the top of the dome and at length emerged outside. Then there was the whole of Florence and the hills and woods and villages and distant scenery spread out below you under the sun and sky. All that one had seen and felt inside the cathedral, inside oneself, again disappeared in relation to the great universe. For this was reality, and the other only an image of it in stone! So that this lookout right under the cross suddenly seemed an image of true consciousness, objective consciousness of the world as it is, freedom.
We all continuously pass from sincerity to pretension, from pretension to remorse, from remorse to sincerity. We must observe the cycle, but not allow ourselves to be disheartened by it.
Page 174a
We must try to avoid both regret and blame, whether of others or of ourselves. They will lead us nowhere. There is much to be learned from what may seem to be a lost opportunity. Whether it was lost or not depends not upon what we did then but on how much understanding we can get out of it now. What looks to us like our mistakes can give us far more understanding than what we count as our successes.
Last updated 1999.02.02, 2 06.00 GMT.
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