It is better to create than to be learned. Creating is the essence of life.
I know we shall meet again, for God does not destroy what He has made, nor do souls meet by accident. This life is full of riddles, but divine riddles have a divine solution.
The life is more than meat, and the body is more than raiment.
Ewig jung zu bleiben / Ist, wie Dichter schreiben / Hochstes Lebensgut; / Willst du es erwerben / Musst du fruhe sterben=--To continue eternally young is, as poets write, the highest bliss of life; wouldst thou attain to it, thou must die young.
Great happiness makes one feel so often that it cannot last, and that we will have some day to give up all to which one's heart clings so. A few years sooner or later, but the time will come, and come quicker than one expects. Therefore I believe it is right to accustom oneself to the thought that we can none of us escape death, and that all our happiness here is only lent us. But at the same time we can thankfully enjoy all that God gives us, ... and there is still so much left us, so much to be happy and thankful for, and yet here too the thought always rushes across one's brightest hours: it cannot last, it is only for a few years and then it must be given up. Let us work as long as it is day, let us try to do our duty, and be very thankful for God's blessings which have been showered upon us so richly--but let us learn also always to look beyond, and learn to be ready to give up everything,--and yet say, Thy Will be done.
Religion is life, philosophy is thought.... We need both thought and life, and we need that the two shall be in harmony.
Mark this distinction. . . . Imitation is mechanical, reflection organic. The one is occasional, the other habitual. In the one case, man comes to God and imitates Him; in the other, God comes to man and imprints Himself upon him. It is quite true that there is an imitation of Christ which amounts to reflection. But Paul's term includes all that the other holds, and is open to no mistake. "Whom having not seen, I love." The Changed Life, p. 39.
That man is never happy for the present is so true that all his relief from unhappiness is only forgetting himself for a little while. Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.--_Johnson._
When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies, "Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life."
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. (The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are.)
As the evolution of nature can be studied with any hope of success in those products only which nature has left us, the evolution of mind also can be effectually studied in those products only which mind itself has left us. These mental products in their earliest form are always embodied in language, and it is in language, therefore, that we must study the problem of the origin, and of the successive stages in the growth of mind.
There is much mystery in Biology. "We know all but nothing of Life" yet, nothing of development. There is the same mystery in the spiritual Life. But the great lines are the same, as decided, as luminous; and the laws of natural and spiritual are the same, as unerring, as simple. Will everything else in the natural world unfold its order, and yield to Science more and more a vision of harmony, and Religion, which should complement and perfect all, remain a chaos? Natural Law, p. 294.
Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields, See how these names are feted in the waving grass And by the streamers of the white cloud And whispers of the wind in the listening sky. The names of those who in their lives fought for life, Who wore at their hearts the fire's centre. Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun And left the vivid air signed with their honour.
Fruit-bearing without Christ is not an improbability, but an impossibility. As well expect the natural fruit to flourish without air and heat, without soil and sunshine. How thoroughly also Paul grasped this truth is apparent from a hundred pregnant passages in which he echoes his Master's teaching. To him life was hid with Christ in God. And that he embraced this, not as a theory but as an experimental truth, we gather from his constant confession, "When I am weak, then am I strong." Natural Law, p. 271.
I am speaking of the life of a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children; who has undertaken to cherish it and do it no damage, not because he is duty-bound, but because he loves the world and loves his children; whose work serves the earth he lives on and from and with, and is therefore pleasurable and meaningful and unending; whose rewards are not deferred until "retirement," but arrive daily and seasonally out of the details of the life of their place; whose goal is the continuance of the life of the world, which for a while animates and contains them, and which they know they can never compass with their understanding or desire.
The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever.
Et rose elle a vecu ce que vivent les roses / L'espace d'un matin=--As rose she lived the life of a rose for but the space of a morning.
Still, a bond forms when you’ve taken a man’s life in your hands, like a spider’s thread, thin but strong.
Cannot a concept exist without a word? Certainly not, though in order to meet every possible objection we may say that no concept can exist without a sign, whether it be a word or anything else. And if it is asked whether the concept exists first, and the sign comes afterwards, I should say no: the two are simultaneous, but in strict logic, the sign, being the condition of a concept, may really be said to come first. After a time, words may be dropt, and it is then, when we try to remember the old word that gave birth to our concept, that we are led to imagine that concepts came first, and words afterwards. I know how difficult it is to see this clearly. We are so accustomed to think without words, that we can hardly realise the fact that originally no conceptual thought was possible without these or other signs.
It is a great many years since, at the outset of my career, I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good, for me, was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction, and have availed myself of the "rara temporum félicitas ubi sentire quæ velis, et quae sentias dicere licet," which is now enjoyable, to the best of my ability; and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.
To every one of us the world was once as fresh and new as to Adam. And then, long before we were susceptible of any other mode of instruction, Nature took us in hand, and every minute of waking life brought its educational influence, shaping our actions into rough accordance with Nature's laws, so that we might not be ended untimely by too gross disobedience. Nor should I speak of this process of education as past for any one, be he as old as he may. For every man the world is as fresh as it was at the first day, and as full of untold novelties for him who has the eyes to see them. And Nature is still continuing her patient education of us in that great university, the universe, of which we are all members--Nature having no Test-Acts.
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well.
Conformity to the will of God is an easy and certain means of acquiring a great treasure of graces in this life.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL.
Ja, so schatzt der Mensch das Leben, als heiliges Kleinod, / Dass er jenen am meisten verehrt, der es trotzig verschmahet=--Yes, man values life as a sacred jewel in such a way that he reveres him most who haughtily scorns it.
Ageless living is courageous living. It means being undistracted by the petty dramas of life because you have enough experience to know what’s not worth worrying about and what ought to be your priorities.
Parents we can have but once; and he promises himself too much who enters life with the expectation of finding many friends.
Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib und Gesang / Der bleibt ein Narr sein Lebenlang=--Who loves not wine, woman, and song, remains a fool all his life long.
Every object naturally seeks to maintain itself in itself.
Proportion is not only to be found in figures and measurements, but also in sound, weight, time and position, and in whatever power which exists.
You can furnish one Christian life. You can furnish a life so faithful to every duty, so ready for every service, so determined not to commit every sin, that the great Christian church shall be the stronger for your living in it, and the problem of the world be answered, and a certain great peace come into this poor, perplexed, phase of our humanity as it sees that new revelation of what Christianity is.--_Phillips Brooks._
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved - loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
He had intellect to comprehend his highest duty distinctly, and force of character to do it; which of us dare ask for a higher summary of his life than that? For such a man there can be no fear in facing the great unknown, his life has been one long experience of the substantial justice of the laws by which this world is governed, and he will calmly trust to them still as he lays his head down for his long sleep.
Tragedy has the great moral defect of giving too much importance to life and death.
The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself.
Whatever energy the soul expends must first be "taken into it from without." We are not Creators, but creatures; God is our refuge AND STRENGTH. Communion with God, therefore, is a scientific necessity; and nothing will more help the defeated spirit which is struggling in the wreck of its religious life than a common-sense hold of this biological principle that without Environment he can do nothing. Natural Law, Environment, p. 267.
That which makes the man no worse than he was makes his life no worse: it has no power to harm, without or within.
I count life just a stuff / To try the soul's strength on.
The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.
Precepts or maxims are of great weight; and a few useful ones at hand do more toward a happy life than whole volumes that we know not where to find.
As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality. It should make our days holy to us. The poet should speak to all men, for a moment, of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.
Live on, brave lives, chained to the narrow round / Of Duty; live, expend yourselves, and make / The orb of Being wheel onward steadfastly / Upon its path--the Lord of Life alone / Knows to what goal of Good; work on, live on.
No man can live half a life when he has genuinely learned that it is only half a life. The other half, the higher half, must haunt him.
The imagination does not perceive such excellent things as the eye, because the eye receives the images or semblances from objects, and transmits them to the perception, and from thence to the brain; and there they are comprehended. But the imagination does not issue forth from the brain, with the exception of that part of it which is transmitted to the memory, and in the brain it remains and dies, if the thing imagined is not of high quality. And in this case poetry is formed in the mind or in the imagination of the poet, who depicts the same objects as the painter, and by reason of the work of his fancy he wishes to rival the painter, but in reality he is greatly inferior to him, as we have shown above. Therefore with regard to the work of fancy we will say that there is the same proportion between the art of painting and that of poetry as exists between the body and the shadow proceeding from it, and the proportion is still greater, inasmuch as the shadow of such a body at least penetrates to {122} the brain through the eye, but the imaginative embodiment of such a body does not enter into the eye, but is born in the dark brain. Ah! What difference there is between imagining such a light in the darkness of the brain and seeing it in concrete shape set free from all darkness.
Comport thyself in life as at a banquet. If a plate is offered thee, extend thy hand and take it moderately; if it be withdrawn, do not detain it. If it come not to thy side, make not thy desire loudly known, but wait patiently till it be offered thee.--_Epictetus._
Marriage with peace is the world's paradise; with strife, this life's purgatory.
The true life of man is in society.
It is sad to think of all that was and is no more, and yet there is something much more real in memory than one used to think. All is there but what our weak human senses require, and nothing is lost, nothing can be lost except what we know would vanish one day, but what was the husk only, not the kernel. I have learnt to live with those who went before us, and they seem more entirely our own than when they were with us in the body. And as long as we have duties to fulfil, so long as there are others who lean on us and want us, life can be lived a few years longer, it can only be a few years.
When I talk of the purpose of life, I am thinking not only of human life, but of all life on Earth and of the life which must exist upon other planets throughout the universe. It is only of life on Earth, however, that one can speak with any certainty. It seems to me that all life on Earth, the sum total of life upon the Earth, has purpose.
Impetus is the impression of motion conveyed by the motive power to the object moved. Every {152} impression tends to permanence or seeks to attain permanence. That every impression seeks after permanence is proved by the impression made by the sun on the eye which regards it, and in the impression of sound made by the hammer which strikes a bell. Every impression seeks after permanence, as is shown in the image of impetus communicated to the object moved.
Our business is not to build quickly, but to build upon a right foundation, and in a right spirit. Life is more than a mere competition as between man and man; it is not who can be done first, but who can work best; it is not who can rise highest in the shortest time, but who is working most patiently and lovingly in accordance with the designs of God.--_Joseph Parker._
Nature has so placed the leaves of the latest shoots of many trees that the sixth leaf is always above the first, and thus in continued succession unless the rule is obstructed. And this she has done for two useful purposes in the plant: firstly, since the branches and the fruit of the following year spring from the bud or eye which is above and in contact with the juncture of the leaves, {177} the water which feeds the shoot may be able to run down and nourish the bud, through the drop being caught in the hollow whence the leaf springs. And the second advantage is that as these buds shoot in the following year, one will not be covered by the other, since the five shoots spring on five different sides.
Men are chosen to be physicians in order to minister to diseases of which they are ignorant.
There is no one so foolish who if offered the choice between everlasting blindness and deafness would not immediately elect to lose both his hearing and sense of smell rather than to be blind. Since he who loves his sight is deprived of the beauty of the world and all created things, and the deaf man loves only the sound made by the percussion of the air, which is an insignificant thing in the world.
There is an ancient saying, famous among men, that thou shouldst not judge fully of a man's life before he dieth, whether it should be called blest or wretched.
The Bhagavad Gita--that ancient Indian Yogic text--says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection.
The way, truth, and life have been found in Christianity, and will not now be found outside of it.
I suppose every child has a world of his own and every man, too, for the matter of that. I wonder if that's the cause for all the misunderstanding there is in Life?
Think of "living!" Thy life, wert thou the "pitifullest of all the sons of earth," is no idle dream, but a solemn reality. It is thy own; it is all thou hast to front eternity with.
When faith is kneeling by his bed of death, And innocence is closing up his eyes, Now if thou wouldst, when all have given him over, From death to life thou might'st him yet recover.
Let us remember that we do not know what the soul was before this life--nay, even what it was during the first years of our childhood. Yet we believe on very fair evidence that what we call our soul existed from the moment of our birth. What ground have we, then, to doubt that it was even before that moment? To ascribe to the soul a beginning on our birthday would be the same as to claim for it an end on the day of our death, for whatever has a beginning has an end. If then, in the absence of any other means of knowledge, we may take refuge in analogy, might we not say that it will be with the soul hereafter as it has been here, and that the soul after its earthly setting will rise again, much as it rose here? This is not a syllogism, it is analogy, and in a cosmos like ours analogy has a right to claim some weight, in the absence of any proof to the contrary.
In the course of scientific exposition the demonstration of a general rule derived from a previous conclusion is not to be censured.
Our life is no dream, but it may and will perhaps become one.
Painting includes in its range the surface, colour and shape of anything created by nature; and philosophy penetrates into the same bodies and takes note of their essential virtue, but it is not satisfied with that truth, as is the painter, who seizes hold of the primary truth of such bodies because the eye is less prone to deception.
~Asceticism.~--I recommend no sour ascetic life. I believe not only in the thorns on the rosebush, but in the roses which the thorns defend. Asceticism is the child of sensuality and superstition. She is the secret mother of many a secret sin. God, when he made man's body, did not give us a fibre too much, nor a passion too many. I would steal no violet from the young maiden's bosom; rather would I fill her arms with more fragrant roses. But a life merely of pleasure, or chiefly of pleasure, is always a poor and worthless life, not worth the living; always unsatisfactory in its course, always miserable in its end.--_Theodore Parker._
Programming is like sex. One mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life.
They say the world has an eagle eye for anything inconsistent, an eye sharp to discover the vagaries and inconsistencies in the defaulty and the unworthy. It has an eagle eye; but the eagle winks before the sun, and the burning iris of its eye shrinks abashed before the unsullied purity of noon. Let your light so shine before men, that others, awed and charmed by the consistency of your godly life, may come to enquire, and to say you have been with Jesus.--_Punshon._
The laws of those sciences which are capable of extensive analysis I will confine in brief conclusions, and according to the nature of the material I will interweave mathematical demonstrations, at times deducing results from causes, and at times tracing causes by results. I will add to my conclusions some which are not contained in these, but which can be deduced from them, if the Lord, the Supreme Light, illuminates me, so that I may treat of light.
[I]n the view of the Founding Fathers of this country, a widespread distribution of property ownership was essential to the preservation of individual liberty and a republican form of government. In their day, of course, they assumed that the seemingly limitless land of the new nation afforded the opportunity for every man to own a freehold farm. Some, however, looked ahead to the important role of property ownership in preserving the American experiment in a distant day and age, when America would lose its predominately agricultural character. As James Madison said in 1787: In future times a great majority of the people will not only be without land, but without any sort of property. These will either combine under the influence of their common situation; in which case the rights of property and the public liberty will not be secure in their hands, or, which is more probable, they will become the tools of opulence and ambition; in which case there will be equal danger on another side. Today, of course, America has come a long way from its origins as a nation of Jeffersonian yeomen. As we became urbanized and industrialized, we tended to lose sight of the importance of widespread property ownership. No longer can we return, as a people, to an 18th century way of life. Yet we should remember that private property is an indispensable part of the foundation of a free country. As time and technology advance, we need to reshape the Founding Fathers’ idea of the importance of widespread property ownership to fit new circumstances. This is particularly true in a Nation in which millions of families now have no ownership stake in anything greater than a television set or secondhand automobile. [ Congressional Record , June 8, 1971, p. S8483.]
True theories…are the expression of actual facts and are characterized by being able to predict new facts, a natural consequence of these already known. In a word, the characteristic of a true theory is its fruitfulness. [ The Life of Pasteur .]
O ye loved ones, that already sleep in the noiseless Bed of Rest, whom in life I could only weep for and never help; and ye who, wide-scattered, still toil lonely in the monster-bearing desert, dyeing the flinty ground with your blood,--yet a little while, and we shall all meet There, and our Mother's bosom will screen us all; and Oppression's harness, and Sorrow's fire-whip, and all the Gehenna bailiffs that patrol and inhabit ever-vexed Time, cannot thenceforth harm us any more.
The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.