Echoes

When people see things as beautiful, ugliness is created. When people see things as good, evil is created. Being and non-being produce each other. Difficult and easy complement each other. Long and short contrast each other. High and low rest upon each other.

Men are at variance with the one thing with which they are in the most unbroken communion, the reason that administers the whole universe.

There is nothing new under the sun.

Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony.

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

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.

Everything changes; nothing perishes.

From nothing comes nothing. Nothing that exists can be destroyed. All changes are due to the combination and separation of atoms.

I believe it is in our nature to explore, to reach out into the unknown. The only true failure would be not to explore at all.

Human nature being what it is, events which happened in the past will at some time or other and in much the same ways be repeated in the future.

There is not love of life without despair about life.

Men never do good unless necessity drives them to it; but when they are free to choose and can do just as they please, confusion and disorder become rampant.

If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because it was I.

Whilst in speaking of human things, we say that it is necessary to know them before we can love them...the saints on the contrary say in speaking of divine things that it is necessary to love them in order to know them, and that we only enter truth through charity.

Nature, considered rationally, that is to say, submitted to the process of thought, is a unity in diversity of phenomena; a harmony, blending together all created things, however dissimilar in form and attributes; one great whole animated by the breath of life.

All men by nature desire to know.

All is not frustrated, though thou find thyself very often afflicted or grievously tempted. Thou art man, not God; thou art flesh, not an angel.

I rebel — therefore we exist.

A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.

Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.

Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight.

All things keep on in everlasting motion, out of the infinite come the particles speeding above, below, in endless dance.

But let there be spaces in your togetherness, and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love.

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.