Echoes

I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole.

Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.

To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. It is to know shame at the sight of poverty which is not of our making.

You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean, in a drop.

Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

We all have enough strength to bear the misfortunes of others.

All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end.

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.

Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto. (I am a man; nothing human is alien to me.)

It appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should only be organised dust — ready to fly abroad the moment the spring snaps, or the spark goes out which kept it together. Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable, and life is more than a dream.

There is no man in the world free from trouble or anguish, though he were King or Pope.

Not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home.

The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key!

The body is a great reason, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd.

It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature.

The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.

A man contains all that is needful to his government within himself. He is made a law unto himself. All real good or evil that can befal [sic] him must be from himself. He only can do himself any good or any harm. Nothing can be given to him or can taken from him but always there is a compensation.. There is a correspondence between the human soul and everything that exists in the world; more properly, everything that is known to man. Instead of studying things without the principles of them, all may be penetrated unto with him. Every act puts the agent in a new position. The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself. He is not to live the future as described to him but to live the real future to the real present. The highest revelation is that God is in every man.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

I felt before I thought: this is the common lot of humanity.

Out of my experience, such as it is (and it is limited enough) one fixed conclusion dogmatically emerges, and that is this, that we with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves. ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.

In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, — he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight.

Everything in the universe is within you. Ask all from yourself.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

The body is a sacred garment. It is what you enter life in and what you depart life with, and it should be treated with honour, and with joy and with fear as well.