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Nine Things to Remember When Offended:
- You are a part of mankind, not a thing apart. You were born to lead.
- Put yourself in the minds of those who offend you.
- If what annoys you is done in the right, you should not be perturbed. If it’s wrong, know that it done unintentionally or in ignorance. They know not what they do.
- Remember that you offend others in ways you don’t know.
- You can’t know the hidden intentions of others. They may be acting on a perfectly sensible way.
- Remember that mortal life is fleeting. No one will care about this in 100 years.
- It is not the act itself that annoys us, but the color we ascribe to it.
- The act of becoming angry hurts us more than the act itself.
- Kindness in the moment of another’s rudeness is irresistible. Be kind.
Favorite Passages
If you do the task before you always adhering to strict reason with zeal and energy and yet with humanity, disregarding all lesser ends and keeping the divinity within you pure and upright, as though you were even now faced with its recall – if you hold steadily to this, staying for nothing and shrinking from nothing, only seeking in each passing action a conformity with nature and in each word and utterance a fearless truthfulness, then shall the good life be yours. And from this course no man has the power to hold you back.
Do not indulge in dreams of having what you have not, but reckon up the chief of the blessings you do possess, and then thankfully remember how you would crave for them if they were not yours. At the same time, however, beware lest delight in them leads you to cherish them so dearly that their loss would destroy your peace of mind.
Live not as though there were a thousand years ahead of you. Fate is at your elbow; make yourself good while life and power are still yours.
‘If thou wouldst know contentment, let thy deeds be few,’ said the sage.
Take it that you have died today, and your life’s story is ended; and henceforward regard what further time may be given you as an uncovenanted surplus, and live it out in harmony with nature.
Many of the anxieties that harass you are superfluous: being but creatures of your own fancy, you can rid yourself of them and expand into an ampler region, letting your thought sweep over the entire universe, contemplating the illimitable tracts of eternity, marking the swiftness of change in each created thing, and contrasting the brief span between birth and dissolution with the endless aeons that precede the one and the infinity that follows the other.
Whatever befalls, Nature has either prepared you to face it or she has not. If something untoward happens which is within your powers of endurance, do not resent it, but bear it as she has enabled you to do. Should it exceed those powers, still do not give way to resentment; for its victory over you will put an end to its own existence. Remember, however, that in fact Nature has given you the ability to bear anything which your own judgement succeeds in declaring bearable and endurable by regarding it as a point of self-interest and duty to do so.
The good life can be achieved to perfection by any soul capable of showing indifference to the things that are themselves indifferent.
It is time now to realize the nature of the universe to which you belong, and of that controlling Power whose offspring you are; and to understand that your time has a limit set to it. Use it, then, to advance your enlightenment; or it will be gone, and never in your power again.
In the life of a man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his senses a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, and his fame doubtful. In short, all that is of the body as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapours; life a warfare, a brief sojourning in an alien land; and after repute, oblivion.
Think of the totality of all Being, and what a mite of it is yours; think of all Time, and the brief fleeting instant of it that is allotted to yourself; think of Destiny, and how puny a part of it you are.
Let your mind constantly dwell on all Time and all Being, and thus learn that each separate thing is but as a grain of sand in comparison with Being, and as a single screw’s-turn in comparison with Time.
I consist of a formal element and a material. Neither of these can ever pass away into nothing, any more than either of them came into being from nothing. Consequently every part of me will one day be refashioned, by a process of transition, into some other portion of the universe; which in its turn will again be changed into yet another part, and so onward to infinity. It is the same process by which I myself was brought into existence, and my parents before me, and so backward once more to infinity.
Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
All the blessings which you pray to obtain hereafter could be yours today, if you did not deny them to yourself. You have only to have done with the past altogether, commit the future to providence, and simply seek to direct the present hour aright into the paths of holiness and justice.
Any form of nature always outrivals art, since every art is no more than an imitation of the natural.
I often marvel how it is that though each man loves himself beyond all else, he should yet value his own opinion of himself less than that of others.
Practice, even when success looks hopeless.
For as the mutation and dissolution of bodies make room for other bodies doomed to die, so the souls that are removed into the air, after life’s existence, are transmuted and diffused into the seminal intelligence of the universe, and make room for new souls. Thou hast existed as a part; thou shalt disappear in that which produced thee…This, too, nature wills…. Pass, then, through this little space of time conformably to nature, and end thy journeys in content, just as an olive falls when it is ripe, blessing the nature that produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew.