A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility.
Interpretation
Maintaining a peaceful mind is essential for personal perfection and emotional stability.
This quote emphasizes the importance of maintaining a calm and peaceful mind as a key aspect of human perfection. It suggests that one should not let transient desires or passions disrupt their inner tranquility, highlighting the value of emotional regulation and self-control in achieving a harmonious life.
In practice
In a mindfulness workshop, a speaker used this quote to illustrate the importance of emotional balance.
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of a void, but out of chaos; the materials must in the first place be afforded; it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.
The instructor can scarcely give sensibility where it is essentially wanting, nor talent to the unpercipient block. But he can cultivate and direct the affections of the pupil, who puts forth, as a parasite, tendrils by which to cling, not knowing to what - to a supporter or a destroyer.
What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.
I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine.
Heavy misfortunes have befallen us, but let us only cling closer to what remains, and transfer our love for those whom we have lost to those who yet live. Our circle will be small, but bound close by the ties of affection and mutual misfortune. And when time shall have softened your despair, new and dear objects of care will be born to replace those of whom we have been so cruelly deprived.
Hateful day when I received life!' I exclaimed in agony. 'Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemlance. Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and abhorred.' - Frankenstein
Man was not made for the service of economies; economies were made to serve mankind; and men and women were made - so we believe - to serve one another, not just ourselves.
In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time. The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along.
Henceforth the cosmos, once a swarm of blazing galaxies, each a swarm of stars, was composed wholly of star-corpses. These dark grains drifted through the dark void, like an infinitely tenuous smoke rising from an extinguished fire. Upon these motes, these gigantic worlds, the ultimate populations had created here and there with their artificial lighting a pale glow, invisible even from the innermost ring of lifeless planets.
...you have to leave the island in order to see the island, that we can't see ourselves unless we become free of ourselves, Unless we escape from ourselves you mean, No, that's not the same thing.
Deception is a developed art of civilization and the most potent weapon in the game of power
What reason, like the careful ant, draws laboriously together, the wind of accident sometimes collects in a moment.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.