It's so horrible to see your own confusion and understand it.

If you are sure you understand everything that is going on, you are hopelessly confused.

Now that I have you thoroughly confused, let me pause to hear your own dismayed cry.

Self-contemplation is a curse
That makes an old confusion worse.

When you're thinking about something that you don't understand, you have a terrible, uncomfortable feeling called confusion. It's a very difficult and unhappy business. And so most of the time you're rather unhappy, actually, with this confusion. You can't penetrate this thing. Now, is the confusion's because we're all some kind of apes that are kind of stupid working against this, trying to figure out [how] to put the two sticks together to reach the banana and we can't quite make it, the idea? And I get this feeling all the time that I'm an ape trying to put two sticks together, so I always feel stupid. Once in a while, though, the sticks go together on me and I reach the banana.

It is worse still to be ignorant of your ignorance.

Nothing is more intolerable than to have admit to yourself your own errors.

Oh my life is so awful, it's just so awful to be me, you don't know what it's like waking every morning and finding the whole horror of being yourself still there.

The utmost degree of gnosis is dismay and perplexity.

Nothing is more intolerable than to have to admit to yourself your own errors.

It is no small pity, and should cause us no little shame, that, through our own fault, we do not understand ourselves, or know who we are.

Unless you really understand others, you can hardly attain your own self-understanding.

For a being as sophisticated as you are, it is baffling how little understanding you have of the composition of your own mind.

One of ennui's most terribel components is the overwhelming feeling of ennui that comes over you whenever you try to explain it.