'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free, 'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be, And when we find ourselves in the place just right, 'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
The indignation which makes verses is, properly speaking, an inverted love; the love of some right, some worth, some goodness, belonging to ourselves or others, which has been injured, and which this tempestuous feeling issues forth to defend and revenge.
Every form of freedom is hurtful, except that which delivers us over to perfect command of ourselves.
If people would only learn to see that there is really a religion beyond all religions, that each man must have his own religion which he has conquered for himself, and that we must learn to tolerate religion wherever we find it! Christianity would be a perfect religion, if it did not go beyond the simple words of Christ, and if, even in these words, we made full allowance for the time and place and circumstances in which they were spoken--that is, if we simply followed Christ where He wishes us to follow Him. We have gone far beyond those times and circumstances in many things, but in what is most essential we are still far behind the teaching of Christ. How many call themselves Christians who have no idea how difficult it is to be a Christian, a follower of Christ! It is easy enough to repeat creeds, and to work ourselves into a frame of mind when miracles seem most easy.
Many of us don’t dream; more dangerously, many of us don’t spend quality time thinking. We worry, yes, but we do not think. We don’t project ourselves into the future. We don’t utilize imagination. For many who do dream, what is lacking is the translation of the dream into reality and the tenacity to hold on to the dream when the going gets tough.
While we are indifferent to our good qualities, we keep on deceiving ourselves in regard to our faults, until we come to look upon them as virtues.
The pious and just honouring of ourselves may be thought the radical moisture and fountain-head from whence every laudable and worthy enterprise issues forth.
Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.
explain to Atticus that it wasn’t so much what Francis said that had infuriated me as the way he had said it. “It was like he’d said snot-nose or somethin’.” “Scout,” said Atticus, “nigger-lover is just one of those terms that don’t mean anything—like snot-nose. It’s hard to explain—ignorant, trashy people use it when they think somebody’s favoring Negroes over and above themselves. It’s slipped into usage with some people like ourselves, when they want a common, ugly term to label somebody.” “You aren’t really a nigger-lover, then, are you?” “I certainly am. I do my best to love everybody . . . I’m
Judged by an ethical standard, nothing can be less satisfactory than the position in which we find ourselves. In a real, though incomplete, degree we have attained the condition of peace which is the main object of social organization; and, for argument's sake, it may be assumed that we desire nothing but that which is in itself innocent and praiseworthy--namely, the enjoyment of the fruits of honest industry. And lo! in spite of ourselves, we are in reality engaged in an internecine struggle for existence with our presumably no less peaceful and well-meaning neighbours. We seek peace and we do not ensue it. The moral nature in us asks for no more than is compatible with the general good; the non-moral nature proclaims and acts upon that fine old Scottish family motto, "Thou shalt starve ere I want." Let us be under no illusions, then. So long as unlimited multiplication goes on, no social organization which has ever been devised, or is likely to be devised, no fiddle-faddling with the distribution of wealth, will deliver society from the tendency to be destroyed by the reproduction within itself, in its intensest form, of that struggle for existence the limitation of which is the object of society. And however shocking to the moral sense this eternal competition of man against man and of nation against nation may be; however revolting may be the accumulation of misery at the negative pole of society, in contrast with that of monstrous wealth at the positive pole; this state of things must abide, and grow continually worse, so long as Istar holds her way unchecked. It is the true riddle of the Sphinx; and every nation which does not solve it will sooner or later be devoured by the monster itself has generated.
It is in the path where God has bade us walk that we shall find the angels around us. We may meet them, indeed, on paths of our own choosing, but it will be the sort of angel that Balaam met, with a sword in his hand, mighty and beautiful, but wrathful too; and we had better not front him! But the friendly helpers, the emissaries of God's love, the apostles of His grace, do not haunt the roads that we make for ourselves.--_Alex. McLaren._
To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.
Nothing but ourselves can finally beat us.
In any controversy, the instant we feel angry we have already ceased striving for truth and begun striving for ourselves.
I think that one of our most important tasks is to convince others that there's nothing to fear in difference; that difference, in fact, is one of the healthiest and most invigorating of human characteristics without which life would become meaningless. Here lies the power of the liberal way: not in making the whole world Unitarian, but in helping ourselves and others to see some of the possibilities inherent in viewpoints other than one's own; in encouraging the free interchange of ideas; in welcoming fresh approaches to the problems of life; in urging the fullest, most vigorous use of critical self-examination.
We ought not to isolate ourselves, for we cannot remain in a state of isolation. Social intercourse makes us the more able to bear with ourselves and with others.
We are often governed by people not only weaker than ourselves, but even by those whom we think so.
We gain nothing by being with such as ourselves. We encourage one another in mediocrity. I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself.
Religious and philosophical beliefs are, indeed, as dangerous as fire, and nothing can take from them that beauty of danger. But there is only one way of really guarding ourselves against the excessive danger of them, and that is to be steeped in philosophy and soaked in religion.
No external power, no terrorist organization, can defeat us. But we can defeat ourselves by getting caught in a quagmire.
We draw the foam from the great river of humanity with our quills, and imagine to ourselves that we have caught floating islands at least.
Laughter almost ever cometh of things most disproportioned to ourselves.
The world is nothing but a wheel; in its whole periphery it is everywhere similar, but, nevertheless, it appears to us so strange, because we ourselves are carried round with it.
Thus, all this abundant wealth of money and of vivid life is Nature's interest upon her investment in club-mosses, and the like, so long ago. But what becomes of the coal which is burnt in yielding this interest? Heat comes out of it, light comes out of it; and if we could gather together all that goes up the chimney, and all that remains in the grate of a thoroughly-burnt coal-fire, we should find ourselves in possession of a quantity of carbonic acid, water, ammonia, and mineral matters, exactly equal in weight to the coal. But these are the very matters with which Nature supplied the club-mosses which made the coal. She is paid back principal and interest at the same time; and she straightway invests the carbonic acid, the water, and the ammonia in new forms of life, feeding with them the plants that now live. Thrifty Nature! Surely no prodigal, but most notable of housekeepers!
It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.
To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.
We talk little if we do not talk about ourselves.
Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...
The best government is that which teaches us to govern ourselves.
It is difficult to be always true to ourselves, to be always what we wish to be, what we feel we ought to be. As long as we feel that, as long as we do not surrender the ideal of our life, all is right. Our aspirations represent the true nature of our soul much more than our everyday life. I feel as much as you, how far I have been left behind in the race which I meant to run, but I honestly try to rouse myself, and to live up to what I feel I ought to be. Let us keep up our constant fight against all that is small and common and selfish, let us never lose our faith in the ideal life, in what we ought to be, and in what with constant prayer to God we shall be, and let us never forget how unworthy we are of all the blessings God has showered down upon us.
On n'est souvent mecontent des autres que parce qu'on l'est de soi-meme=--We are often dissatisfied with others because we are so with ourselves.
We should offer ourselves and all we have to God, that He may dispose of us according to His holy will, so that we may be ever ready to leave all and embrace the afflictions that come upon us.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL.
The quarrel toucheth none but us alone, / Betwixt ourselves let us decide it then.= 1
'Tis a wrong way to proportion other men's pleasures to ourselves. 'Tis like a child's using a little bird--"Oh, poor bird, thou shalt sleep with me"--so lays it in his bosom and stifles it with his hot breath. The bird had rather be in the cold air. And yet, too, 'tis the most pleasing flattery to like what other men like.--_Selden._
On se persuade mieux pour l'ordinaire par les raisons qu'on a trouvees soi-meme, que par celles qui sont venues dans l'esprit des autres=--We are ordinarily more easily satisfied with reasons that we have discovered ourselves, than by those which have occurred to others.
_The sovereign good. Dispute about the sovereign good._--_Ut sis contentus temetipso et ex te nascentibus bonis._ There is a contradiction, for finally they advise suicide. Ah! happy life indeed, from which we are to free ourselves as from the plague.
Among those points of self-education which take up the form of mental discipline, there is one of great importance, and, moreover, difficult to deal with, because it involves an internal conflict, and equally touches our vanity and our ease. It consists in the tendency to deceive ourselves regarding all we wish for, and the necessity of resistance to these desires. It is impossible for any one who has not been constrained, by the course of his occupation and thoughts, to a habit of continual self-correction, to be aware of the amount of error in relation to judgment arising from this tendency. The force of the temptation which urges us to seek for such evidence and appearances as are in favour of our desires, and to disregard those which oppose them, is wonderfully great. In this respect we are all, more or less, active promoters of error. In place of practising wholesome self-abnegation, we ever make the wish the father to the thought: we receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us; whereas the very reverse is required by every dictate of common sense.
We lie down and rise up with the skeleton allotted to us for our mortal companion--the phantom of ourselves.
unfathomable to the most experienced prophets in Maycomb County, autumn turned to winter that year. We had two weeks of the coldest weather since 1885, Atticus said. Mr. Avery said it was written on the Rosetta Stone that when children disobeyed their parents, smoked cigarettes and made war on each other, the seasons would change: Jem and I were burdened with the guilt of contributing to the aberrations of nature, thereby causing unhappiness to our neighbors and discomfort to ourselves.
If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.
We should only utter higher maxims so far as they can benefit the world. The rest we should keep within ourselves, and they will diffuse over our actions a lustre like the mild radiance of a hidden sun.
If we would amend the world, we should mend ourselves and teach our children what they should be.
Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, / Which we ascribe to heaven.
When we are well we wonder how we should get on if we were sick, but when sickness comes we take our medicine cheerfully, into that the evil resolves itself. We have no longer those passions and that desire for amusement and gadding abroad, which were ours in health, but are now incompatible with the necessities of our disease. So then nature gives us passions and desires in accordance with the immediate situation. Nothing troubles us but fears, which we, and not nature, make for ourselves, because fear adds to the condition in which we are the passions of the condition in which we are not.
We figure to ourselves The thing we like; and then we build it up, As chance will have it, on the rock or sand,-- For thought is tired of wandering o'er the world, And homebound Fancy runs her bark ashore.
The even and cheerful temper makes us pleasing to ourselves, to those with whom we converse, and to Him whom we were made to please.
The example of Alexander's chastity has not made so many continent as that of his drunkenness has made intemperate. It is not shameful to be less virtuous than he, and it seems excusable to be no more vicious. We do not think ourselves wholly partakers in the vices of ordinary men, when we see that we share those of the great, not considering that in such matters the great are but ordinary men. We hold on to them by the same end by which they hold on to the people, for at whatsoever height they be, they are yet united at some point to the lowest of mankind. They are not suspended in the air, abstracted from our society. No, doubly no; if they are greater than we, it is because their heads are higher; but their feet are as low as ours. There all are on the same level, resting on the same earth, and by the lower extremity are as low as we are, as the meanest men, as children, and the brutes.
We are all, always, the desire not to die. This desire is as immeasurable and varied as life's complexity, but at bottom this is what it is: To continue to be, to be more and more, to develop and to endure. All the force we have, all our energy and clearness of mind serve to intensify themselves in one way or another. We intensify ourselves with new impressions, new sensations, new ideas. We endeavour to take what we do not have and to add it to ourselves. Humanity is the desire for novelty founded upon the fear of death. That is what it is.
I have always been interested in the way that elements of stories twine and combine. At school I had an art teacher, a great influence on me, who disliked man-made objects unless they were old and showed the effects of time and wear; she loved all natural things. I share this attitude and it plays a large part in my writing. I'm fascinated by the ambiguity of man's relationship to the huge, mysterious universe around him; how, on the one hand, we make ourselves little boxes and think to exist safely and snugly in them; on the other, we extend our knowledge further and further into the limitless void; and yet from time to time these opposites collide and produce astonishing results.
Yet it is an astonishing thing that the mystery most removed from our knowledge, that of the transmission of sin, should be a thing without which we can have no knowledge of ourselves. For it is certain that nothing more shocks our reason than to say that the sin of the first man rendered those culpable, who, being so distant from the source, seem incapable of participation in it. This transfusion does not only seem to us impossible, but even most unjust, for there is nothing so repugnant to the rules of our miserable justice as to damn eternally an infant incapable of will, for a sin in which he seems to have so scanty a share, that it was committed six thousand years before he was in being. Certainly nothing shocks us more rudely than this doctrine, and yet without this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we are incomprehensible to ourselves. The tangle of our condition takes its plies and folds in this abyss, so that man is more inconceivable without the mystery than the mystery is inconceivable to man.
Decet patriam nobis cariorem esse quam nosmetipsos=--Our country ought to be dearer to us than ourselves.
It is our hope for ourselves, and for His truth, and for mankind. Men come and go. Leaders, teachers, thinkers, speak and work for a season, and then fall silent and impotent. He abides. They die, but He lives. They are lights kindled, and therefore, sooner or later quenched, but He is the true Light from which they draw all their brightness, and He shines for evermore.--_Alex. McLaren._
Too many people are unaware that it is not outer events or circumstances that will create happiness; rather, it is our perception of events and of ourselves that will create, or uncreate, positive emotions.
We may have a confident hope of our salvation when we apply ourselves to relieve the souls in purgatory, so afflicted and so dear to God.--ST. ALPHONSUS.
"I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves."
We wish for truth, and find in ourselves only uncertainty.
The great world for which we live seems to me as good as the little world in which we live, and I have never known why faith should fail, when everything, even pain and sorrow, is so wonderfully good and beautiful. All that we say to console ourselves on the death of those we loved, and who loved us, is hollow and false; the only true thing is rest and silence. We cannot understand, and therefore we must and can trust. There can be no mistake, no gap, in the world-poem to which we belong; and I believe that those stars which without their own contrivance have met, will meet again. How, where, when? God knows this, and that is enough.
We make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.
No one saves us but ourselves, No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path Buddhas merely teach the way. By ourselves is evil done, By ourselves we pain endure, By ourselves we cease from wrong, By ourselves become we pure.
Eleven days, and yet it took them forty years! How was this? Alas! we need not travel far for the answer. It is only too like ourselves. How slowly we get over the ground! What windings and turnings! How often we have to go back and travel over the same ground, again and again. We are slow travelers because we are slow learners. Our God is a faithful and wise, as well as a gracious and patient Teacher. He will not permit us to pass cursorily over our lessons. Sometimes, perhaps, we think we have mastered a lesson and we attempt to move on to another, but our wise Teacher knows better, and He sees the need of deeper ploughing. He will not have us mere theorists or smatterers; He will keep us, if need be, year after year at our scales until we learn to sing.--=C. H. M.=
Social intercourse makes us the more able to bear with ourselves and others.
I believe in the continuity of Self. If there were an annihilation or complete change of our individual self-consciousness, we might become somebody else, but we should not be ourselves. Personally, I have no doubt of the persistence of the individual after death, as we call it. I cannot imagine the very crown and flower of creation being destroyed by its author. I do not say it is impossible, it is not for us to say either yes or no; we have simply to trust, but that trust or faith is implanted in us, and is strengthened by everything around us.
Let us offer ourselves without delay and without reserve to Mary, and beg her to offer us herself to God.--ST. ALPHONSUS.
The secret of walking closely with Christ, and working successfully for Him, is to fully realize that we are His beloved. Let us but feel that He has set His heart upon us, that He is watching us from those heavens with tender interest, that He is working out the mystery of our lives with solicitude and fondness, that He is following us day by day as a mother follows her babe in his first attempt to walk alone, that He has set His love upon us, and, in spite of ourselves, is working out for us His highest will and blessing, as far as we will let Him, and then nothing can discourage us. Our hearts will glow with responsive love. Our faith will spring to meet His mighty promises, and our sacrifices shall become the very luxuries of love for one so dear. This was the secret of John's spirit. "We have known and believed the love that God hath to us." And the heart that has fully learned this has found the secret of unbounded faith and enthusiastic service.--_A. B. Simpson._
The idea of the infinite, which is at the root of all religious thought, is not simply evolved by reason out of nothing, but supplied to us, in its original form, by our senses. Beyond, behind, beneath, and within the finite, the infinite is always present to our senses. It presses upon us, it grows upon us from every side. What we call finite in space and time, in form and word, is nothing but a veil or a net which we ourselves have thrown over the infinite. The finite by itself, without the infinite, is simply inconceivable; as inconceivable as the infinite without the finite. As reason deals with the finite materials supplied to us by our senses, faith, or whatever else we like to call it, deals with the infinite that underlies the finite. What we call sense, reason, and faith are three functions of one and the same perceptive self; but without sense both reason and faith are impossible, at least to human beings like ourselves.
The web of this world is woven of necessity and contingency; the reason of man places itself between them, and knows how to rule them both. It treats the necessary as the ground of its existence; the contingent it knows how to direct, lead, and utilise; and it is only while reason stands firm and steadfast that man deserves to be called the god of the earth. Woe to him who has accustomed himself from his youth to incline to find something arbitrary in what is necessary, who would fain ascribe a kind of reason to the contingent, which it were even a religion to follow; what is that but to disown one's own understanding, and to give loose reins to one's inclinations? We imagine it piety to saunter along= (_hinschlendern_) =without consideration, and to allow ourselves to be determined by agreeable accidents, and finally give to the results of such a vacillating life the name of Divine guidance.
Dreams in their development have breath / And tears and torture and the touch of joy; / They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts; / They take a weight from off our waking toils; / They do divide our being; they become a portion of ourselves as of our time, / And look like heralds of eternity.
Any concepts or words which have been formed in the past through the interplay between the world and ourselves are not really sharply defined with respect to their meaning: that is to say, we do not know exactly how far they will help us in finding our way in the world. … It will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth.
Pity is imagination or fiction of future calamity to ourselves proceeding from the sense of another man's calamity.
Knowledge that terminates in curiosity and speculation is inferior to that which is useful, and of all useful knowledge that is the most so which consists in a due care and just notion of ourselves.
It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.
One proof of this fills me with dismay. The Catholic religion does not oblige us to tell out our sins indiscriminately to all, it allows us to remain hidden from men in general, but she excepts one alone, to whom she commands us to open the very depths of our heart, and to show ourselves to him as we are. There is but this one man in the world whom she orders us to undeceive; she binds him to an inviolable secrecy, so that this knowledge is to him as though it were not. We can imagine nothing more charitable and more tender. Yet such is the corruption of man, that he finds even this law harsh, and it is one of the main reasons which has set a large portion of Europe in revolt against the Church.