Believe me, we had better leave off all these remedies, Life is a fortress which neither you nor I know anything about. Why throw obstacles in the way of its defence? Its own means are superior to all the apparatus of your laboratories.
Corvisart candidly agreed with me that all your filthy mixtures are good for nothing. Medicine is a collection of uncertain prescriptions the results of which taken collectively are more fatal than useful to mankind. Water, air, and cleanliness are the chief articles in my pharmacopceia.
Never do the will of others, never do anything to please others. If a gentleman comes in right time to help you to carry out what you have just been thinking, oblige him.
If he comes at a time not tallying with your inner feeling, never accompany him.
Live in the Self and all this will be accomplished of itself.
Bonaparte set at naught the Moral Law, which baulked and ruined him; and the result in a million experiments will be the same.
Every experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim, will fail.
As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter.
Only that good profits, which we can taste, with all doors open, and which serves all men.
Goethe:
Vexations and a tempest of passion only fill his sail: as Luther writes, “When I am angry, I can pray well, and preach well.”
His failures are the preparation of his victories.
He cannot hate anybody; his time is worth too much.
It is not from men excellent in any kind that disparagement of any other is to be looked for.
Be real and admirable, not as we know, but as you know.
Able men do not care in what kind a man is able, only that he is able.
Goethe teaches courage, and the equivalence of all times; that the disadvantages of any epoch exist only to the faint-hearted.
No mortgage, no attainder will hold on men or hours. The world is young.
I am here, he would say, to be the measure and judge of these things. Why should I take them on trust?
Satan is none other than pure intellect, applied as always there is a tendency – to the service of the senses.
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Want of practical faith in the moral government of the World = Satan.
Violation of the Spiritual Laws = Satan.
Not realizing the spiritual Unity = Satan.
An insult causes indignation, loud sounds, violent acts.
The thing said bears to the mental action it excites much the same relation that the pulling of a trigger bears to the subsequent explosion, does not produce the power, but merely liberates it.
* * * *
Happy he in whom such detonating powder of insult (?) is altogether absent and however much people may give him occasions for outbursting, is necessarily always silent.
* * * *
Why are people inimical to Vedanta? When a child or some other weak person is walking with a stick in his hand to support himself at every step, if the stick be suddenly taken off from his hand, he will fall down and will be filled with indignation.
It is most desirable that the child should walk erect without the support of any stick; but so long as he is weak, he may be allowed the use of his stick; and gradually made to give up its use.
The stick = personal God.
The child = the ignorant folk.
The child begins to weep, when his mother goes into the adjoining room to fetch something. So do ignorant people begin to weep when some friend of theirs gives up the body, regarding him as actually dead or gone.
That is good which the mother thinks right, not what the child thinks.
The more social animals are in overwhelming preponderance over the unsocial.
Sociability is as much a Law as mutual struggle.
Even wild animals make friendships, have their playmates.
The fittest to survive are those who mutually aid one another, not those who are engaged in mutual struggle. Co-operation in the world (1) among plants, (2) animals, (3) bees, (4) flowers, (5) ants.
* * * *
Myriads of living creatures, remain in the Earth to prepare and renew soils.
Denouement of the drama of Life: afforded by the moral Law.
Struggle comes when man is looking behind.
Co-operation and love when they are advancing.
Thus struggle as well as love are both the cause of advance.
A Rishi will have no friction in his way.
In order to be of use in the world abroad, you will have to live and realise Unity within.
Morality is forced upon the world at the bayonet’s point.
All vegetable kingdom suffers sacrifice for animals. Rice, grains, every plant in the world, lives for others. When man lives upon seeds, he lives upon love. Love is Life.
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Asphides (plant lice) in summer when food is abundant bring forth females, in the famines of autumn, males.
Sex is a paradox; it is that which separates in order to unite. Sex unites nations.
1. In a conservatory, where the asphides enjoy perpetual summer, the succession of females continued to go on for four years and stopped only when temperature lowered and food diminished, then the males were at once produced.
2. Bees. Royal diet and plenty of it determines the future queens. The nurse bees change the diet and workers or drones are produced.
In Reproduction females are as a rule an accompaniment of abundant and rich food, maleness of the reverse.