Sharing the happiness of other people, entering into their feelings, living life over once more with them and in them, that is all that remains to old people. I suppose it was meant to be so, the principal object of life being the overcoming of self, in every sense of the word.
I would like to be remembered as a man who had a wonderful time living life, a man who had good friends, fine family — and I don't think I could ask for anything more than that, actually.
Nostalgia is living life in the past lane.
A Christian should be a striking likeness of Jesus Christ. You have read lives of Christ, beautifully and eloquently written, but the best life of Christ is His living biography, written out in the words and actions of His people. If we were what we profess to be, and what we should be, we would be pictures of Christ; yea, such striking likenesses of Him that the world would not have to hold us up by the hour together, and say, "Well, it seems somewhat of a likeness": but they would, when they once beheld us, exclaim, "He has been with Jesus; he has been taught of Him; he is like Him; he has caught the very idea of the holy Man of Nazareth, and he works it out in his life and every day actions."--_Spurgeon._
I have seen the truth; I have seen and I know that people can be beautiful and happy without losing the power of living on earth. I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind. And it is just this faith of mine that they laugh at. But how can I help believing it? I have seen the truth — it is not as though I had invented it with my mind, I have seen it, seen it, and the living image of it has filled my soul for ever. I have seen it in such full perfection that I cannot believe that it is impossible for people to have it. And so how can I go wrong? I shall make some slips no doubt, and shall perhaps talk in second-hand language, but not for long: the living image of what I saw will always be with me and will always correct and guide me. Oh, I am full of courage and freshness, and I will go on and on if it were for a thousand years! Do you know, at first I meant to conceal the fact that I corrupted them, but that was a mistake — that was my first mistake! But truth whispered to me that I was lying, and preserved me and corrected me. But how establish paradise — I don't know, because I do not know how to put it into words. After my dream I lost command of words. All the chief words, anyway, the most necessary ones. But never mind, I shall go and I shall keep talking, I won't leave off, for anyway I have seen it with my own eyes, though I cannot describe what I saw. But the scoffers do not understand that. It was a dream, they say, delirium, hallucination. Oh! As though that meant so much! And they are so proud! A dream! What is a dream? And is not our life a dream? I will say more. Suppose that this paradise will never come to pass (that I understand), yet I shall go on preaching it. And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that's the chief thing, and that's everything; nothing else is wanted — you will find out at once how to arrange it all. And yet it's an old truth which has been told and retold a billion times — but it has not formed part of our lives! The consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness — that is what one must contend against. And I shall. If only everyone wants it, it can be arranged at once.
There are three ways in which a man becomes a slave. He may be born into slavery, or forced into it, or he can deliberately accept his servitude. All three forms flourish in the modern world. Men are born and forced into slavery in Russia and her satellites states. Men in the free world invite slavery when they ask the government to provide complete security, when they surrender their freedom to the “Welfare State.” The slave states of Western world are an outgrowth of monopolistic capitalism — an economic system which is opposed to the wide distribution of private property in many hands. Instead, monopolistic capitalism concentrates productive wealth among a few men, allowing the rest to become a vast proletariat. Some representatives of monopolistic capitalism, sensing this evil in their system, have tried to silence criticism by pointing to the diffused ownership in the great corporations. They advertise, “No one owns more than 4 percent of the stock of this great company.” Or they print lists of stockholders, showing that these include farmers, schoolteachers, baseball players, taxi drivers, and even babies. But there is a catch to this argument, and it is this: although it is true that individuals of small means own shares in the company, it is not true that they run the company. Their responsibility for its policies is nil. Possession properly has two faces, two aspects: we all have a right to private property, but this is accompanied by our responsibility for its righteous use. These two things (which should be inseparable) are frequently divided today. Everyone admits that the farmer who own a horse is obligated to feed and care for it, but in the case of stocks and bonds, we often forget that the same principle should prevail. Monopolistic capitalism is to blame for this; it sunders the right to own property from responsibility that owning property involves. Those who own only a few stocks have no practical control of any industry. They vote by postcard proxy, but they have rarely even seen “their” company. The two elements which ought to be inextricably joined in any true conception of private property — ownership and responsibility — are separated. Those who own do not manage; those who manage; those who manage and work do not control or own. The workmen in a factory may have a shadowy, unknown absentee “employer” — the thousands of individual owners of stock — whom “management” represents and tries to please by extra dividends. The workman’s livelihood is at the disposition of strangers who make a single demand of their representatives: higher profits. Faced with such insecurity, labor unions seek a solution in demands for higher wages, shorter hours, pensions, and such things. But this approach takes monopolistic capitalism for granted, and accepts the unnatural division between property and responsibility as permanent. A much more radical solution is apt to come, and this may take either of two forms. One way of remedying the situation would be through a profound alternative of our political and economic life, with the aim of distributing the means of production more widely by giving every workman a share in profits, management, and ownership, all three. The other alternative which is not a constructive solution is confiscation: this may take the violent form of communism, or the less noticeable form of bureaucratic encroachment through taxation, as favored by the welfare state. [and/or outright confiscation likened to General Motors, AIG, and Banks, etc. etc. etc.] Confiscation in any form is an unhealthy solution for a real disease. It amounts to telling men that because they are economically crippled, they must abandon all efforts to get well and allow the state to provide them with free wheelchairs. The denial of the right of ownership to a man is a denial of his basic freedom: freedom without property is always incomplete. To be “secured” — but with no accompanying responsibility – is to be the slave of whatever group provides the security. A democracy flirts with the danger of becoming a slave in direct ratio to the numbers of its citizens who work, but do not own / or who own, but do not work; or who distribute, as politicians do, but do not produce. The danger of the “slave state” disappears in ratio to the numbers of people who own property and admit its attendant responsibilities under God. They can call their souls their own because they own and administer something other than their souls. Thus they are free. [“New Slavery: Freedom without Property is Incomplete,” originally published in On Being Human: Reflections, On Life and Living , New York: Doubleday & Co., 1982.]
Growing older is an opportunity for you to increase your value and competence as the neural connections in your hippocampus and throughout your brain increase, weaving into your brain and body the wisdom of a life well lived, which allows you to stop living out of fear of disappointing others and being imperfect. 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.
What, then, is that which we call Death? Separation of the Self from a living body. If so, does the body die because the Self leaves it, or does the Self leave the body because it dies? What has life to do with the Self? Has the Self which for a time dwells in a living body anything to do with what we call the life of that body? Does the Self take possession of a body because it lives, or does the body live because the Self has taken possession of it? The difficulty arises from our vague conception of _life_. Life is only a mode of existence. Existence is possible without what we call life, not life without existence. To live means to be able to absorb, but who or what is able? The Self exists, it is sentient, capable of perception by becoming embodied. It is perceptive because sentient, it is conceptive because perceptive. The difficulty lies in the embodiment. It is there where all philosophy becomes ridiculous.
A side note, if I may. Yes, we’re all responsible for our own lives and our individual walk with Christ. But I think a certain responsibility also falls on those who are called to preach and teach. For hundreds of years far too many men and women who have preached to us and taught us God’s Word have taken the most important message in all of history and made it dry as sawdust. They’ve made the Living Word of Life so parched and tasteless it’s a wonder anyone still listens.
Defining philosophy as “an activity, attempting by means of discussion and reasoning, to make life happy,” he believed that happiness is gained through the achievement of moral self-sufficiency (autarkeia) and freedom from disturbance (ataraxia). The main obstacles to the goal of tranquillity of mind are our unnecessary fears and desires, and the only way to eliminate these is to study natural science. The most serious disturbances of all are fear of death, including fear of punishment after death, and fear of the gods. Scientific inquiry removes fear of death by showing that the mind and spirit are material and mortal, so that they cannot live on after we die: as Epicurus neatly and logically puts it: “Death…is nothing to us: when we exist, death is not present; and when death is present, we do not exist. Consequently it does not concern either the living or the dead, since for the living it is non-existent and the dead no longer exist” (Letter to Menoeceus 125). As for fear of the gods, that disappears when scientific investigation proves that the world was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, that the gods live outside the world and have no inclination or power to intervene in its affairs, and that irregular phenomena such as lightning, thunder, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes have natural causes and are not manifestations of divine anger. Every Epicurean would have agreed with Katisha in the Mikado when she sings: But to him who’s scientific There’s nothing that’s terrific In the falling of a flight of thunderbolts! So the study of natural science is the necessary means whereby the ethical end is attained. And that is its only justification: Epicurus is not interested in scientific knowledge for its own sake, as is clear from his statement that “if we were not disturbed by our suspicions concerning celestial phenomena, and by our fear that death concerns us, and also by our failure to understand the limits of pains and desires, we should have no need of natural science” (Principal Doctrines 11). Lucretius’ attitude is precisely the same as his master’s: all the scientific information in his poem is presented with the aim of removing the disturbances, especially fear of death and fear of the gods, that prevent the attainment of tranquillity of mind. It is very important for the reader of On the Nature of Things to bear this in mind all the time, particularly since the content of the work is predominantly scientific and no systematic exposition of Epicurean ethics is provided.25 Epicurus despised philosophers who do not make it their business to improve people’s moral condition: “Vain is the word of a philosopher by whom no human suffering is cured. For just as medicine is of no use if it fails to banish the diseases of the body, so philosophy is of no use if it fails to banish the suffering of the mind” (Usener fr. 221). It is evident that he would have condemned the majority of modern philosophers and scientists.
A man need not go into a cave because he has found his true Self; he may live and act like everybody else; he is 'living but free.' All remains just the same, except the sense of unchangeable, imperishable self which lifts him above the phenomenal self. He knows he is wearing clothes, that is all. If a man does not see it, if some of his clothes stick to him like his very skin, if he fears he might lose his identity by not being a male instead of a female, by not being English instead of German, by not being a child instead of a man, he must wait and work on. Good works lead to quietness of mind, and quietness of mind to true self-knowledge. Is it so very little to be only Self, to be the subject that can resist, i.e. perceive the whole universe, and turn it into his object? Can we wish for more than what we are, lookers-on--resisting what tries to crush us, call it force, or evil, or anything else?
If a captive mind is unaware of being in prison, it is living in error. If it has recognized the fact, even for the tenth of a second, and then quickly forgotten it in order to avoid suffering, it is living in falsehood. Men of the most brilliant intelligence can be born, live and die in error and falsehood. In them, intelligence is neither a good, nor even an asset. The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.
Tools may be animate as well as inanimate; for instance, a ship’s captain uses a lifeless rudder, but a living man for watch; for a servant is, from the point of view of his craft, categorized as one of its tools. So any piece of property can be regarded as a tool enabling a man to live, and his property is an assemblage of such tools; a slave is a sort of living piece of property; and like any other servant is a tool in charge of other tools. For suppose that every tool we had could perform its task, either at our bidding or itself perceiving the need, and if—like the statues made by D?dalus or the tripods of Heph?stus, of which the poet says that “self-moved they enter the assembly of the gods” — shuttles in a loom could fly to and fro and a plectrum play a lyre all self-moved, then master-craftsmen would have no need of servants nor masters of slaves. [ The Politics . Book I, Chapter iv, §1253b23.]
This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but to say that it is the worst is mere petulant nonsense. A worn-out voluptuary may find nothing good under the sun, or a vain and inexperienced youth, who cannot get the moon he cries for, may vent his irritation in pessimistic moanings; but there can be no doubt in the mind of any reasonable person that mankind could, would, and in fact do, get on fairly well with vastly less happiness and far more misery than find their way into the lives of nine people out of ten. If each and all of us had been visited by an attack of neuralgia, or of extreme mental depression, for one hour in every twenty-four--a supposition which many tolerably vigorous people know, to their cost, is not extravagant--the burden of life would have been immensely increased without much practical hindrance to its general course. Men with any manhood in them find life quite worth living under worse conditions than these.
On the 23d of April, 1490, I began this book; and started again on the horse. Giacomo came to live with me on Saint Mary Magdalen's day in 1490; {49} he was ten years old. He was a thief, a liar, obstinate, and a glutton. On the second day I had two shirts made for him, a pair of socks and a jerkin, and when I placed the money aside to pay for these things, he stole it out of the purse and I could never force him to confess the fact, though I was quite certain of it--4 lire. On the following day I went to sup with Giacomo Andrea, and this same Giacomo supped for two and did mischief for four, since he broke three bottles, spilled the wine, and after this came to sup where I... Item: on the 7th of September he stole a silver point, worth twelve soldi, from Marco, who was living with me, and took it from his studio; and when Marco had looked for it for some time he found it hidden in Giacomo's box--lire 1, soldi 2. Item: on the 26th of the following January, being in the house of Messer Galeazzo di San Severino, in order to arrange the festivity of his joust, and certain henchmen having undressed to try on the costumes of rustics who were to take part in the aforesaid festivity, Giacomo took the purse of one of them, which was on the bed with other clothes, and stole the money he found in it--2 lire, 4 soldi. Item: Maestro Agostino of Padua gave me while I was in the same house a Turkish hide to have a pair of shoes made of it, and Giacomo stole this from me within a month and sold it to a cobbler for 20 soldi, with which money by his own confession he bought sweets of aniseed. Item: {50} again, on the 2d of April, Giovanni Antonio left a silver point on one of his drawings, and Giacomo stole it; it was worth 24 soldi,--1 lire, 4 soldi. The first year a cloak, 2 lire; six shirts, 4 lire; three doublets, 6 lire: four pairs of socks, 7 lire, 8 soldi.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. [Speech, “Where Do We Go From Here?” by Martin Luther King, Jr. made to the Tenth Anniversary Convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (S.C.L.C) in Atlanta on August 16, 1967. Dr. King projected in it the issues which led to Poor People’s March on Washington. From Foner, Philip S., The Voice of Black America: New York, 1972.] A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will “thingify” them and make them things. And therefore, they will exploit them and poor people generally economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and it will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together. What I’m saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, “America, you must be born again! . . .[ Ibid .] What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. . . . [ Ibid .] Another basic challenge is to discover how to organize our strength in terms of economic and political power. [Ibid.] Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change. Walter Reuther defined power one day. He said, “Power is the ability of a labor union like the U.A.W. to make the most powerful corporation in the world, General Motors, say ‘Yes’ when it wants to say ‘No.’ That’s power.” [Ibid.] Now a lot of us are preachers, and all of us have our moral convictions and concerns, and so often have problems with power. There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly. [Ibid.] [A] host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts among husbands, wives and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on the scale of dollars is eliminated. [Ibid.] [T]he Movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here. And one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s market place. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. You see, my friends, when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question, “Who owns the oil?” You begin to ask the question, “Who owns the iron ore?” [Ibid.] One night, a juror came to Jesus and he wanted to know what he could do to be saved. Jesus didn’t get bogged down in the kind of isolated approach of what he shouldn’t do. Jesus didn’t say, “Now Nicodemus, you must stop lying.” He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, you must stop cheating if you are doing that.” He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, you must not commit adultery.” He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, now you must stop drinking liquor if you are doing that excessively.” He said something altogether different, because Jesus realized something basic – that if a man will lie, he will steal. And if a man will steal, he will kill. So instead of just getting bogged down in one thing, Jesus looked at him and said, “Nicodemus, you must be born again.” He said, in other words, “Your whole structure must be changed.” A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will “thingify” them — make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally, economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together. What I am saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, “America, you must be born again!” [Ibid.] [L]et us go out with a “divine dissatisfaction.” Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort and the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice. Let us be dissatisfied until those that live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security. Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history, and every family is living in a decent sanitary home. Let us be dissatisfied until the dark yesterdays of segregated schools will be transformed into bright tomorrows of quality, integrated education. Let us be dissatisfied until integration is not seen as a problem but as an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity. Let us be dissatisfied until men and women, however black they may be, will be judged on the basis of the content of their character and not on the basis of the color of their skin. Let us be dissatisfied. Let us be dissatisfied until every state capitol houses a governor who will do justly, who will love mercy and who will walk humbly with his God. Let us be dissatisfied until from every city hall, justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. Let us be dissatisfied until that day when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together. and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid. Let us be dissatisfied. And men will recognize that out of one blood God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth. Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout “White Power!” — when nobody will shout “Black Power!” — but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power. [Ibid.]