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This fault in us I find,
The error of our eye directs our mind:
What error leads must err; O, then conclude
Minds sway’d by eyes are full of turpitude.
It is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense — that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, or aspect or modification of it, as in Spinoza’s pantheism. For we should have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? What objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you and all other conscious beings as such are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is, in a certain sense, the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance.
The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud, if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues.
Time, force, and death,
Do to this body what extremes you can;
But the strong base and building of my love
Is as the very centre of the earth,
Drawing all things to it.
What matters is what we love, for that is what determines the true and final course of our lives.
The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand.
Households, cities, countries, and nations have enjoyed great happiness when a single individual has taken heed of the Good and Beautiful. Such men not only liberate themselves; they fill those they meet with a free mind.
Set aside all reflection, for you will find it hard to reason about how God leads you. If you are determined to pursue reasoning you may become very good at it and convince yourself to follow your own way. Or worse, you will reason that you are following God.
I will chide no breather in the world but myself, against whom I know most faults.
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
If powers divine
Behold our human actions, as they do,
I doubt not then but innocence shall make
False accusation blush, and tyranny
Tremble at patience.
Who teaches men to be grateful pleads the cause not only of men, but of the gods for they, being placed above all desires, cannot be of want of anything, yet we can nevertheless offer them our gratitude.
Although men are accused for not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps as few know their strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.
Nothing can trouble him more, nothing can move him, for he has cut all the thousand cords of will which hold us bound to the world… as desire, fear, envy, anger, drag us here and there in constant pain. He now looks back smiling and at rest on the delusions of the world, which once were able to move and agonize his spirit also.
Most become happy only through imitation, and deliberately counterfeit high spirits and cheerfulness.
All our progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
Let fortune do her worst, whatever she makes us lose, so long as she never makes us lose our honesty and independence.
Some persons depress their own minds, despond at the first difficulty; and conclude that making any progress in knowledge, farther than serves their ordinary business, is above their capacities.
Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future. And time future contained in time past.