Quotations, page 4
Defeat may serve as well as victory
To shake the soul and let the glory out.
When the great oak is straining in the wind,
The boughs drink in new beauty, and the trunk
Sends down a deeper root on the windward side.
Only the soul that knows the mighty grief
Can know the mighty rapture. Sorrows come
To stretch our spaces in the heart for joy.
- Edwin Markham.
No end to suffering until
We grasp it with awakened will
Inhale its perfume gratefully,
At length discovering it to be
No foe but friend, a light to see
A brother's heart with charity,
To understand and to forgive.
Through suffering alone we live!
Only through suffering grow wise!
Whom suffering speeds to joy arise!
- Phylllis Campbell
Do not feel qualms or despondency or
discomfiture if thou dost not invariably succeed
in acting from right principles; but when thou art
foiled, come back again to them, and rejoice if
on the whole thy conduct is worthy of a man,
and love the course to which thou returnest.
- Marcus Aurelius
There was always more in the world than men
could see, walked they ever so slowly;
they will see it no better for going fast.
- Ruskin
Think that this day will never come again!
The heavens are calling you and wheel around you,
Displaying to you their eternal beauties,
And still your eye is looking on the ground!
- Dante
Live your life while you have it. Life is a splendid gift.
There is nothing small in it. For the greatest things
grow by God's law out of the smallest. But to live
your life, you must discipline it. You must not fritter
it away in fair purpose, erring acts, inconsistant will;
but must make your thoughts, your words, your acts,
all your work to the same end, and that end not self,
but God.
- Florence Nightingale
How quiet the greatest dramas!
No sign for sleeping mankind
Betrays the wary serpent.
Under the waters of Life.
Only the wise divine and the awakened see
The currents that sweep to Death.
- Eleanor Trives
But one thing withdraweth many from
profiting in virtue, and from amendment of life,
that is, a horror and a false worldly dread that
they may not abide the pain and labour that is
needful for the getting thereof.
- Thomas a Kempis
The man who does not restrain himself from wantonness
allies himself with the beasts. It is easier to contend
with evil at the beginning than at the end. You can have
no greater and no smaller dominion than over yourself.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so you must know pain. And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy; And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields. And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.
- Kahil Gibran, The Prophet