Mary Everest Boole

“ Many of the world's wealthy ones appear to be sincerely desirous to give to us more than crumbs of their external advantages. But there seems to be some insuperable obstacle in the way. The poor in money, health, sanity, culture, and reputation are always with us, and the other poor, the poor in the science of forging passion into power, are with us too. ”

“ Perhaps one reason why the world's favoured ones find it difficult to reach us either to give or to receive effectively, is that we, the poor, do not reach each other. Perhaps if we were more generous to each other, the current thus set flowing might draw with it the possibility of effective currents being set flowing across barriers made by worldly prosperity.
I hope in this volume to introduce to each other various kinds of persons who, in various ways, have successfully learned the great art of converting passion into power. ”

“ Now, therefore, let us, who understand each other, learn some logic together, and write so that the world shall understand something of which you have caught a glimpse, and which you know to be part of the scientific framework round which must be organised anything which could claim the right to describe itself as an organic art of thinking. ”

“ The most commonplace consciousness wabbles slightly up and down at times; so that one end dips a little way back, or down, into the Past, and the other a little way forward, or up, into the Future.
But there are other conditions of consciousness besides the commonplace ones:—genius, asceticism, insanity, idiocy, criminal tendency, melancholy, suicidal mania, all that is eccentric, abnormal, or out of line with the commonplace average proceedings of the age in which the individual lives. All of these can be represented by a more serious tilting of the stick ”

“ Dear friends, never suppose that, because you yourselves are unable to swim in mid-channel, therefore you are cut off from the great joy of delivering your message to your fellow-men and women.
Thoughts are facts; and they can pass through barriers impenetrable to human bodies. ”

“ In matters of external advantage the poor must feed on the crumbs which fall from the rich man's table. In the mental science of how to suspend passion so as to convert it into power, the inverse rule holds good. Or perhaps it would be a truer statement of the case if we said that the same rule holds good in both realms, but the classification is inverted: the rich in the goods of this world have to ask for crumbs which fall from the table of the others. ”

“ For the young mother, who has a little time to read on Sunday evening after her baby has gone to sleep, and plenty of time to think over what she has read while she makes its clothes or holds it to her breast. It may help her to steer the child into something like its true place in the world in which it will have to live. ”

“ Now, the problem of forging Passion into Power is that of changing any position of the stick which represents a condition of the consciousness that is not commonplace and that is undesirable, into some position which represents a desirable one. ”

“ There will be no stop to the supply of criminal classes till the brutal and rowdy type of hooligan is trained as magnetic healer to the over-sensitive, over-intellectual, over-conscientious, over-refined type of man and woman. ”

“ People who are well-to-do, free and cultured, and who live in beautiful surroundings, admire those lines and find enjoyment in reading them; but you, who are in prison, say, and say truly, that they bring no message of comfort to you; stone walls do make a prison for you, and you see no use in pretending to deny it. ”

“ For the cloistered sister who is beginning to wonder why she cut herself off from the joys which other women prize—provided, that is to say, that she has the courage to ask the question of God, and wait to hear His answer; not thinking it necessary to stun herself, as the heathen do, with vain repetitions of pious statements which she does not believe but only thinks she ought to believe. ”

“ The superstition against eating fruit grown on the dead bodies of one’s friends is a good specimen of the wasteful and distracting kind of idolatry which keeps the world in bondage. What are fruit-trees for, if not to forge and transform cannibalistic selfishness into sacramental joy? While we eat meat, we are obliged to cut the lives of creatures short, because those which die a natural death are unsuitable for food. ”

“ For the man or woman condenmed by circumstances either to a life of monotonous drudgery or to one of dreary idleness, or to a still more dreary round of so-called social duties, which are not really due to anyone, and of so-called social pleasures which do not please.
For the man who knows he has something to tell the world, but has not found his way to any adequate mode of utterance. ”

“ I am neither parson nor moralist; it is no part of my function to tell you that such passions are wicked. They are, in their own way, not bad material for art. If you have nothing to think about except stormy passions and desires, think about them ”

“ You do not, you cannot, doubt the value of your own message to the world; many of you are certified “megalomaniacs” because you cannot be got to disbelieve it. What you most long for is that someone in the outer world should believe in it with you. ”

“ On his ninetieth birthday David Marks received congratulations and thanks from Jews all over the world for having pioneered the way for Israel from slavery and superstition towards culture and progress.
But the reformer, in his anxiety to purify the old Hebrew ritual from superstitious and misleading accretions, left out several elements of overwhelming importance to our knowledge of the methods of culture in use in the Sacred Past where men were trained in the science of prophecy. ”

“ The Art of Thinking can be learned, and practised, with very homely and even unbeautiful material to think about. It is said that the finest poetry in the Yiddish language was written by a man who toiled seventeen hours a day in a factory and lived in a hideous tenement of New York. ”

“ There is no cure for the world’s evils except linking them together in suitably assorted pairs, in such-wise that they neutralise the evilness of each other.
There can be no adequate supply of heat-force till we convert into heat the great devastating meteorological forces. ”

“ If you have become a criminal after being brought up “respectably,” as it is called, learn to think artistically about the relations and the contrast between what is called respectability and what is called crime. ”

“ When we are trying to put our household goods in order, we find it useful to provide ourselves with convenient shelves, racks, and hooks on which to store them; when we are trying to put our thoughts in order, we find it advisable to fasten up in our memories a convenient framework of imagery on which we can register our thought-processes. ”

“ We cannot all acquire skill in weaving words into harmonious verse, but we can all be artists in thought and group ideas harmoniously. Whatever you have to think about, learn to think according to the Laws of Thought. ”

“ She refused to accept from her "honourable" father the insolent patronage which such men offer to those who have inherited their own pride; preferring to face the struggle for life in a world of strangers. ”

“ What is necessary is a willingness on the part of the readers not to resist but to aid the writer in furnishing their minds with simple imagery, derived from various departments of human life, including science. ”

“ There is no real solution of the sanitation problem or the food-supply problem till we devise good systems of sewage-farming and of earth-to-earth burial. I am glad to take this opportunity of stating my conviction that cremation and burying under stone are polar mistakes. Cremation may be necessary in cases of zymotic disease until we have devised something better. But I feel convinced that the scientific solution is that every carcase of man and beast shall be buried underground and a fruit-tree planted over it. ”

“ There will be no stopping the spread of insanity till different types of abnormal neurosis act as magnetic healers to each other.
There can be no sound scheme of education till we know how to assort children in pairs and link them so that they give each other a strong impetus towards some desirable end. ”

“ Which positions represent undesirable states and which desirable ones, we shall see as we go on. For the present, the business on hand is to familiarise your imagination with the stick in all its possible positions. ”

“ Perhaps some reader may feel inclined to say that his mind is neither innocent nor quiet; that he has nothing to think of except anger, hatred, and unsatisfied lusts. That is not quite true of anybody ”

“ She suffered terribly from the constant companionship of lunatics, some of whom were vicious, and of doctors and nurses, all of whom were ignorant of psychology, and, though kindly and well-meaning, often hideously irreverent. ”

“ For the voyager to far countries, who can take one or two small volumes in his small luggage. It may help him to prepare for a better understanding of the relation between the people he is leaving behind and those whose acquaintance he is about to make. ”