Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

Others apart sat on a hill retir’d, In thoughts more elevate, and reason’d high Of Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, Fix’d fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, And found no end, in wand’ring mazes lost.

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?

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.

When I consider how my light is spent, Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, And that one talent which is death to hide Lodg’d with me useless.

I was all ear, And took in strains that might create a soul Under the ribs of Death.

By all means use sometimes to be alone.

This thing of darkness I Acknowledge mine.

Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope, With what I most enjoy contented least; Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, Haply I think on thee.

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.

Malcolm: Dispute it like a man. Macduff: I shall do so; But I must also feel it as a man: I cannot but remember such things were, That were most precious to me.

Who can be wise, amaz’d, temperate and furious, Loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man.

Your face, my thane, is as a book where men May read strange matters.

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

Or have we eaten on the insane root That takes the reason prisoner?

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.

I am not merry, but I do beguile The thing I am by seeming otherwise.

For I am nothing if not critical.

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

It oft falls out, To have what we would have, we speak not what we mean.

And sometimes we are devils to ourselves When we will tempt the frailty of our powers, Presuming on their changeful potency.

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

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.

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

How all occasions do inform against me, And spur my dull revenge! What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. Sure he that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and godlike reason To fust in us unus’d.