Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

No man is free who is not master of himself.

Virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do.

A note: despair at the badness of the book; can’t think how I ever could write such stuff—and with such excitement: that’s yesterday: today I think it good again. A note, by way of advising other Virginias with other books that this is the way of the thing: up down up down—and Lord know the truth.

The most solid advice … for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell, and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

Every writer’s assumption is that he is as other human beings are, and that they are more or less as he is. There’s a principle of psychic unity. [Writing] was not meant to be an occult operation; it was not meant to be an esoteric secret.

Never write about a place until you’re away from it, because it gives you perspective.

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.

But all the story of the night told over, And all their minds transfigur’d so together, More witnesseth than fancy’s images, And grows to something of great constancy, But, howsoever, strange and admirable.

Modest doubt is call’d The beacon of the wise, the tent that searches To the bottom of the worst.

Beauty, wit, High birth, vigor of bone, desert in service, Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all To envious and calumniating time. One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.

I am a very foolish fond old man, Fourscore and upward, not an hour more or less; And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

There’s no art To find the mind’s construction in the face: He was a gentleman on whom I built An absolute trust.

How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure! Still to ourselves in every place consign’d, Our own felicity we make or find.

A sadder and a wiser man He rose the morrow morn.

’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, Should let itself be snuff’d out by an article.

On that green light that lingers in the west: I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.

Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak A lasting inspiration, sanctified By reason, blest by faith: what we have loved, Others will love, and we will teach them how; Instruct them how the mind of man becomes A thousand times more beautiful than the earth On which he dwells.

Joy is the sweet voice, joy the luminous cloud— We in ourselves rejoice! And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, All melodies the echoes of that voice, All colors a suffusion from that light.

No villain need be! Passions spin the plot: We are betrayed by what is false within.

The Soul selects her own Society— Then—shuts the Door— To her divine Majority— Present no more—

They would not find me changed from him they knew— Only more sure of all I thought was true.

That looks in on to a mood apart.

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

When such as I cast out remorse So great a sweetness flows into the breast We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blest.