Echoes

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

Everything is interaction and reciprocal.

Nature does not do anything in vain.

All things are interwoven with one another; a sacred bond unites them; there is scarcely one thing that is isolated from another. Everything is coordinated, everything works together in giving form to one universe. The world-order is a unity made up of multiplicity: God is one, pervading all things; all being is one, all law is one (namely, the common reason which all thinking persons possess) and all truth is one– if, as we believe, there can be but one path to perfection for beings that are alike in kind and reason.

That which comes after ever conforms to that which has gone before.

Nature is to be found in her entirety nowhere more than in her smallest creatures.

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

The cure of many diseases is unknown to physicians of Hellas, because they are ignorant of the whole, which ought to be studied also; for the part can never be well unless the whole is well.

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

The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.

For one man cannot do right in one department of life whilst he is occupied in doing wrong in any other department. Life is one indivisible whole.

Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Everything is flowing — going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water. Thus the snow flows fast or slow in grand beauty-making glaciers and avalanches; the air in majestic floods carrying minerals, plant leaves, seeds, spores, with streams of music and fragrance; water streams carrying rocks … . While the stars go streaming through space pulsed on and on forever like blood globules in Nature's warm heart.

Rocks and waters, etc., are words of God and so are men. We all flow from one fountain Soul. All are expressions of one Love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all.

Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past.

There is nothing new under the sun.

You must know the big ideas in the big disciplines and use them routinely — all of them, not just a few.

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

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.

History is largely a record of human behavior, and human behavior has not greatly changed.

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those who have not viewed the world.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.