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It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them.
I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality, that it is but a shadow’s shadow.
Dreams, indeed, are ambition, for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
One ought every day at least to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
I feel that all I know and all I teach, will do nothing for my own soul, if I spend my time, as most people do, in business or company, even the best company. My soul starves to death in the best company; and God is often lost in prayers and ordinances. “Enter into thy chamber,” said He, “and shut thy door about thee!” Some words in Scripture are very emphatical. “Shut thy door” means much: it means — shut out, not only nonsense, but business — not only the company abroad, but the company at home: It means — let thy poor soul have a little rest and refreshment; and God have opportunity to speak to thee in a small still voice, or He will speak in thunder.
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand.
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
O scion of Bharat, I am also the knower of all the individual fields of activity. The understanding of the body as the field of activities, and the soul and God as the knowers of the field, this I hold to be true knowledge.
Kindnesses are easily forgotten; but injuries! what worthy man does not keep those in mind?
If man were a unity instead of being a multiplicity, he would have true individuality.
Human history is the long terrible story of a man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
Hell is a state of mind — ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind — is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable remains.
Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?
If we turn our minds towards the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.
Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
If circumstances lead me, I will find
Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed
Within the centre.
To expostulate what majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night night, and time is time,
Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time.
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
Let observation with extensive view,
Survey mankind, from China to Peru;
Remark each anxious toil, each eager strife,
And watch the busy scenes of crowded life;
Then say how hope and fear, desire and hate,
O’erspread with snares the clouded maze of fate,
Where wav’ring man, betray’d by vent’rous pride
To tread the dreary paths without a guide,
As treach’rous phantoms in the mist delude,
Shuns fancied ills, or chases airy good.
How rarely reason guides the stubborn choice,
Rules the bold hand, or prompts the suppliant voice,
How nations sink, by darling schemes oppress’d,
When vengeance listens to the fool’s request.
Fate wings with ev’ry wish th’ afflictive dart,
Each gift of nature, and each grace of art,
With fatal heat impetuous courage glows,
With fatal sweetness elocution flows,
Impeachment stops the speaker’s pow’rful breath,
And restless fire precipitates on death.
Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784), Excerpted from The Vanity of Human Wishes
