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False happiness renders men stern and proud, and that happiness is never communicated. True happiness renders them kind and sensible, and that happiness is always shared.
An unattended mind is the breeding ground of self-defeat.
So may the outward shows be least themselves:
The world is still deceived with ornament.
In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt,
But, being seasoned with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil?
The Man Watching
I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister.
The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.
What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.
When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers’ sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.
Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.
There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word.
When you thus cease to be finite, you become one with the Infinite. In the reduction of your soul to its simplest self, its divine essence, you realize this Union, this Identity.
Let us put the ideas of our mind, just as we put things of the laboratory, to the test of experience.
Take away their diversion, and you will see them dried up with weariness. They feel then their nothingness without knowing it… If our condition were truly happy, we would not need diversion.
We must follow, not force Providence.
If good, why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
Against the use of nature? Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings:
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man, that function
Is smother’d in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not.
I like your silence, it the more shows off
Your wonder.
We are surrounded by a rich and fertile mystery. May we not probe it, pry into it, employ ourselves about it, a little?
That nature alone is good that refrains from doing unto another whatsoever is not good for itself.
Origen says the soul’s quest of God comes by self-observation. If she knew herself she would know God also.
You know not, wandering one, where you are flying to. You will run into an enemy while fleeing from an enemy.
Human life is thus only an endless illusion. Men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does when we are gone. Society is based on mutual hypocrisy.
A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be insulted by a man in a fever. Just so, should a wise man treat all mankind as a physician treats a patient, and look upon it only as sick and irresponsible.
O, what men dare do! What men may do!
What men daily do, not knowing what they do!
Every day to a wise man is a new life.
We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we desire to shine. We labor unceasingly to adorn and preserve this imaginary existence, and neglect the real. And if we possess calmness or generosity or truthfulness, we are eager to make it known, so as to attach these virtues to that imaginary existence.
