Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life's supreme mystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it in any direction. On the other hand |
Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. |
Men habitually use only a small part of the powers which they possess and which they might use under appropriate circumstance. |
Men's activities are occupied into ways -- in grappling with external circumstances and in striving to set things at one in their own topsy-turvy mind. |
Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. |
Most men's friendships are too inarticulate. |
Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make very small use of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. |
Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second. |
Much of what we call evil can often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight |
My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. |
Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void |
Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us. |
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. |
Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. |
New habits can be launched . . . on condition of there being new stimuli and new excitements. |