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The social impulse does not rest directly upon the love of people, but upon the fear of solitude. It is not just the charm of having the company of others that people seek; it is the dreary oppression of being alone — the monotony of their own consciousness — that they would avoid. They will do anything to escape it, even put up with bad companions, and tolerate the feeling of restraint which all society involves, which is very burdensome.
[This philosophy we speak of is] Cheerful and yet profound, like an October afternoon.
Easy is the descent into the lower world. Night and day the door of glowing dis stands open. But to recall thy steps and pass out to the upper air, this is the task, this is the work.
I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as an angel from heaven, which, whilst consulting others, inquires still more of the oracle within itself, and uses instructions from abroad not to supersede, but to quicken and exalt, its own energies.
These few precepts in thy memory
See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch’d, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear’t that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous sheaf in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
You must have patience. He who can see truly in the midst of general infatuation is like a man whose watch keeps good time, when all clocks in the town in which he lives are wrong. He alone knows the right time.
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.
By neglecting self-interest we achieve self-interest.
It only seems as if there’s something more important for you to do than to just quietly be yourself.
Our dependance upon God ought to be so entire and absolute that we should never think it necessary, in any kind of distress to seek out human consolations.
The foolish reject what they see, not what they think; the wise reject what they think, not what they see. Observe things as they are and don’t pay attention to other people.
There is nothing more flattering than the bare truth, boldly uttered. But, all the same, those who can bear it are the rare exceptions in human nature.
The animal existence of a man does not constitute human life alone. Life, according to the will of God only, is also not human life. Human life is a combination of the animal life and the divine life. And the more this combination approaches to the divine life, the more life there is in it.
Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. Humanity only begins for man with self-surrender.
God is gathering us out of all regions till he can make resurrection of our own hearts from the very earth, and teach us that we are all of one substance, and members of one another. For the one who loves his neighbor loves God, and the one who loves God, loves his own soul.
Human mercy is on one’s neighbor, but the mercy of the Lord is for all flesh… reproving, disciplining and teaching, and bringing it back as a shepherd does the flock.
A man must relate himself to new forces, coming from that which he has not realized, through seeing things differently, through touching ideas that have transforming power and that can only be proved by his own experience of them and never evidentially by an appeal to the outer world of the sense.
Truth does not hurt. Rather, it is our resistance to its message that causes pain.
Good sense and good-nature are never separated, though the ignorant world has thought otherwise. Good nature, by which I mean beneficence and candor, is the product of right reason.
The soul, when using the body as an instrument of perception — that is to say, when using the sense of sight and hearing, or some other sense — for the meaning of perceiving through the body is perceiving through the senses — is dragged by the body through the region of the changeable (the temporal), and wanders about and is confused. The world spins round her. She is like a drunkard when she touches change… But when, returning into herself she reflects, then she passes into the region of Eternity.
