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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
Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.
The most commonplace truth when it floods the whole soul, is like a revelation.
We do not have to understand new things, but by dint of patience, effort and method to come to understand with our whole self the truths which are evident.
Attention alone — that attention which is so full that the ‘I’ disappears — is required of me. I have to deprive all that I call ‘I’ of the light of my attention and turn it on to that which cannot be conceived.
And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me…
And as to you Corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me,
I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing,
I reach to the leafy lips, I reach to the polish’d breasts of melons.
And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,
(No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.)
Life is a dream. Death is an awakening.
O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables — meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;
At least I’m sure it may be so in Denmark.
I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there;
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix’d with baser matter: yes, by heaven!
