Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

Stripping away the irrational, the illogical, and the impossible, I am left with atheism. I can live with that.

We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking.

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.

What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

Clear your mind of cant.

Everyone needs a sense of shame, but no one needs to feel ashamed.

Every man can see things far off but is blind to what is near.

When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.

No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

Nothing is more active than thought, for it travels over the universe, and nothing is stronger than necessity for all must submit to it.

Ful wys is he that kan hymselven knowe!

Be careful whom you associate with. It is human to imitate the habits of those with whom we interact. We inadvertently adopt their interests, their opinions, their values, and their habit of interpreting events.

Now see that noble and most sovereign reason, Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh.

Macbeth: Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain, And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart? Doctor: Therein the patient Must minister to himself. Macbeth: Throw physic to the dogs; I’ll none of it.

Neither a borrower, nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.

A mind not to be chang’d by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.

Awake, my St. John! 4 leave all meaner things To low ambition, and the pride of kings. Let us, since life can little more supply Than just to look about us, and to die, Expatiate free o’er all this scene of man; A mighty maze! but not without a plan.

The harvest of a quiet eye.

I thought of Chatterton, 4 the marvelous boy, The sleepless soul that perished in his pride; Of him 5 who walked in glory and in joy Following his plow, along the mountainside: By our own spirits are we deified: We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

A reasoning, self-sufficing thing, An intellectual All-in-all!

God Appears and God is Light To those poor Souls who dwell in Night, But does a Human Form Display To those who Dwell in Realms of day.

Of its own beauty is the mind diseased.

Among them, but not of them; in a shroud Of thoughts which were not their thoughts.

O lady! we receive but what we give And in our life alone does Nature live.