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Genius is eternal patience.
My unassisted heart is barren clay,
That of its native self can nothing feed.
Of Good and pious works Thou art the seed,
That quickens only where Thou sayest it may.
Unless Thou show to us Thine own true way,
No man can find it.
Father! Thou must lead.
The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.
What you do when you don’t have to determines what you will be, when you can no longer help it.
If
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream — and not make dreams your master;
If you can think — and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss[ess];
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings — nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And — which is more — you’ll be a Man, my son!
I have never written the music that was in my heart to write. Perhaps I never shall with this brain and these fingers, but I know that hereafter it will be written. When, instead of these few inlets of the senses through which we now secure impressions from all without, there shall be a flood of impressions from all sides, and instead of these few tones of our little octave there shall be an infinite score of harmonies — for I feel it, I am sure of it. This world of music, whose borders even now I have scarcely entered, is a reality, is immortal.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the same mind at the same time.
Freedom is not a constant attribute which we either “have” or “have not.” In fact, there is no such thing as “freedom” except as a word and an abstract concept. There is only one reality: the act of freeing ourselves in the process of making choices. In this process the degree of our capacity to make choices varies with each act, with our practice of life.
He is marking time, and he lives and dies like one of the million things he produces. He thinks of God, instead of experiencing God.
The greatest part of mankind, nay, of all Christians, may be said to be asleep. That particular way of life, which takes up each man’s mind, thoughts and actions, may be very well called his particular dream. The learned and the ignorant, the rich and the poor, are all in the same state of slumber, passing away a short life in a different kind of dream.
The humble knowledge of thyself is a surer way to God than the deepest search after science.
If you wish to grow in your spiritual life, you must not allow yourself to be caught up in the workings of the world. You must find time alone, away from the noise and confusion, away from the allure of power and wealth.
Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.
Many people want to serve God, mostly in an advisory capacity.
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, “What! You too? I thought I was the only one.”
If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.
Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it — tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if should really become manifest — if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself — you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say, “Here at last is the thing I was made for.” We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.
Perhaps, for many of us, all experience merely defines, so to speak, the shape of that gap where our love of God ought to be. It is not enough. It is something. If we cannot “practice the presence of God,” it is something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness.
I have held many things in my hands, and I have lost them all. But whatever I have placed in God’s hands, that I still possess.