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He raises the afflicted from a dunghill,
For he will settle him with the Rulers of the people.
Do not await the fulfillment of the divine cause you serve, but know that none of your efforts are fruitless, for they all advance the cause.
I do believe you think what now you speak;
But what we do determine oft we break.
Purpose is but the slave to memory.
Study to be quiet.
They who have light in themselves will not revolve as satellites.
When you deceive yourself that you work for the good of all, it makes matters worse, for you should not be guided by your own ideas of what is good for others. A man who claims to know what is good for others is dangerous.
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.
You who love instruction and are eager to listen, receive once again the sacred words: delight yourselves in the honey of wisdom, for it is written, “Good words are honeycombs and their sweetness is the healing of the soul.”
Let me be ignorant, and in nothing good,
But graciously to know I am no better.
I pray thee, O God, that I may be beautiful within.
Not to understand a treasure’s worth… is cause of half the poverty we feel, and makes the world the wilderness it is.
The happy never say, and never hear said, farewell.
There is nothing more useful to man than that which most agrees with his own nature.
The crosses which we make for ourselves by over-anxiety as to the future are not Heaven-sent crosses. We tempt God by our false wisdom, seeking to forestall His arrangements, and struggling to supplement His Providence by our own provisions. The crosses actually laid upon us always bring their own special grace and consequent comfort with them; we see the Hand of God when it is laid upon us. But the crosses wrought by anxious foreboding are altogether beyond God’s dispensations.
Man is not some simple object, nor is he cast in one pattern, but God has made to dwell in the constitution of a single creature a host of forces mingled together and with full-toned voices. We are, I think, a monstrous animal more extraordinary than the Hydra and still more many-headed. For not with the same part of our nature, of course, do we think and desire or feel pain and suffer anger, nor is our fear from the same source as our pleasure. Again you will observe how there is a male element in these organs and a female, and that there is courage and also cowardice. There are, in sooth, all kinds of opposites within us and a certain medial force of nature runs through them which we call “mind.”
You can understand (these principles) by giving careful attention to what has been said.
To look away from the world, or to stare at it, does not help a man to reach God; but he who sees the world in Him stands in His presence.
Always run in the short way, and the short way is the natural. Accordingly, say and do everything in conformity with the soundest reason. For such a purpose frees a man from trouble and warfare and all artificiality.
Mock the time with fairest show:
False face must hide what the false heart doth know.
Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.
