Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

The painter or draftsman ought to be solitary, in order that the well-being of the body not sap the vigor of the mind.

The source of all light is in the eye

There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.

Our opinions do not really blossom into fruition until we have expressed them to someone else.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

'Know thyself' is a good saying, but not in all situations. In many it is better to say 'know others.'

No one has ever properly understood me, I have never fully understood anyone; and no one understands anyone else.

If my body is enslaved, still my mind is free.

To say that man is made up of strength and weakness, of insight and blindness, of pettiness and grandeur, is not to draw up an indictment against him: it is to define him.

Give it an understanding, but no tongue.

So absolute she seems And in herself complete, so well to know Her own, that what she wills to do or say, Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best.

And here, poor fool! with all my lore I stand! no wiser than before. 10

And now I see with eye serene The very pulse of the machine.

There is in souls a sympathy with sounds; And as the mind is pitch’d the ear is pleas’d With melting airs or martial, brisk, or grave: Some chord in unison with what we hear Is touch’d within us, and the heart replies.

Of Newton with his prism and silent face, The marble index of a mind forever Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.

Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of immortality!

Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul When hot for certainties in this our life!

And if I drink oblivion of a day, So shorten I the stature of my soul.

I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond.

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

To us he is no more a person

Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind, is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing any thing, should conceal it as well as she can.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

Muero porque no muero.