Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

Neither blame or praise yourself.

As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.

Chewing the food of sweet and bitter fancy.

My mind is troubled, like a fountain stirr’d; And I myself see not the bottom of it.

To put an antic disposition on.

But I have that within which passeth show; These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

Within the book and volume of my brain.

O, what may man within him hide, Though angel on the outward side!

For who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being, Those thoughts that wander through eternity, To perish rather, swallow’d up and lost In the wide womb of uncreated night, Devoid of sense and motion?

This thing of darkness I Acknowledge mine.

Absence of occupation is not rest, A mind quite vacant is a mind distress’d.

This life’s dim windows of the soul Distorts the heavens from pole to pole And leads you to believe a lie When you see with, not through, the eye. 2

He who doubts from what he sees Will ne’er believe, do what you please. If the sun and moon should doubt They’d immediately go out.

God knows, I’m no the thing I should be, Nor am I even the thing I could be.

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

A man is but the product of his thoughts; what he thinks, he becomes.

I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I

‘Character’ says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms—‘character is destiny.’

I throw myself down in my Chamber, and I call in, and invite God, and his Angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his Angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door.

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

Do I contradict myself?

Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, "This is the real me." And then you have found that attitude, follow it.