Various

“ Marriage, in its deeper aspect, is a means by which the soul prepares itself, through the joys of limited service, for that wider ministry which includes the world. Emerson expresses it better when he says "the lover ascends to the highest beauty, to the love and knowledge of Divinity, by steps on this ladder of created souls." Marriage opens the shortest way by which men and women, self-centred and egotistical, may be compelled, against their will if need be, to become conscious of the joy of sacrifice and the beauty of service. ”

“ From the old darky who preferred a railway wreck to one at sea, because in the former "you'se thar," to the leaders of science, the earth has been the symbol and type of permanence and solidity. Science has yielded one of these characteristics to force, in positing the conservation of energy, but it has never felt quite sure just where to place force in the ultimate analysis of things. Of matter however it has always felt sure—matter was a fact, there has always been just so much in the universe, and always will be just that much and no more or less. ”

“ We cannot of course comprehend why the Divine Consciousness has arranged all this stupendous machinery for the mere sake of becoming manifest. We cannot assume that it is for any reason that we could understand even though it were revealed to us. But we may wonder less perhaps when we consider that time and space are nothing in actual fact, and the immensity of our universe and the tremendous stretches of time that paralyze all thought of reckoning are but trifles not to be considered in contemplating the Infinite. ”

“ The suicide runs from the presence of trouble to the arms of many troubles, and the occult force that aids him in the exercise of his free will holds him to account for committing self-murder with the same firm hand of justice that it would had he murdered his neighbor instead of himself. There is no escape from the consequences of one's acts. The grave is no hiding place. It is the door rather which opens into a court of justice beyond—into a place where the ethical debits and credits of the individual await him that a balance may be struck. ”

“ But this reunion may be accomplished only through yielding the claims of the personal self to the greater Self, the Christos which exists within each personality. A single word gives us the key to the process,—brotherhood.
To this goal there is one royal road and many that are long and terrible. But the royal road may be travelled only by those who are immune from temptation because their consciousness is not centred in the self which may be tempted. Understanding the law, they obey it, for only by obedience may the law be transcended and the soul become free. ”

“ The impulse to Be, produced the world, every atom of which is part of the Creator that produced it. The world is synthesized in man, for man holds in his physical body the essence of everything that is in the world. There is nothing, mineral, vegetable, animal, solid, fluid or gaseous that has not its place in man's organization. Man is pressing forward, evolving to a condition of purity that shall make him perfect and divine, a God enriched with the knowledge gained from numberless lives on earth. He becomes again a spark of the Supreme, but individualized and omniscient. ”

“ Virieu was boisterous, full of jest, and a skeptic in religion. He was through his mother, descended from Montaigne, and he had inherited that author's disposition. He quoted him incessantly.
Lamartine, on the contrary, had inherited from his mother, a melancholic temperament, quiet, serious and religious. He could not bear Montaigne's skepticism, nor his salacious utterances. "Man is born to believe," he declared. "To believe in nothing is the way to accomplish nothing, and impurity in speech is a soiling of the soul." ”

“ If we recognize the brotherhood of humanity we need no reminding to see that it is our duty to ourselves—to our personal selves as well as to our spiritual selves, to help to make cleaner and sweeter the whole world through our own mental, moral and the resultant spiritual cleanness. That will not hurry evolution much in each separate instance, but by the contagion of sympathy and the dynamic power of thought these beneficent, physical atoms can be attracted to us and we can carry about with us their gentle influence for good. ”

“ I am a spark of eternity. Beyond the cold ashes I shall exist even to the dawn, ... And then in my own embers shall I wax in brightness, glow as gold and burn as ruby; I shall pass through the grayness of the dust of this my bed, and before the rosy dawn shall have bathed herself in dew, before the sun shall have lifted his golden gaze from beyond the sea, I shall strike into the flames of life. ”

“ Lamartine conceived that poetry does not consist in the mere sensuousness of verse, but in the ideas, the sentiment, the image. "To change an utterance into music does not perfect it, but materializes it. The simple sentence justly and forcibly expressing the pure thought or naked sentiment without a dream as to the sound or form of phrase, is the genuine style, the expression, the WORD."
These conversations naturally drifted to the supreme questions of the time—to politics, philosophy and religion. ”

“ Hence it is that the atom is as necessary to the universe as a world. It is a very old philosophy, but it is a demonstrable cosmological and psychological fact, for we know that man necessarily lives and moves and has his being under the same law of growth and maintenance that supports and sustains every other entity, even from the atom subdivided into a million parts away to the mightiest god. It is just as incumbent upon the bowlder that it fulfill its destiny as it is that man should fulfill his. ”

“ The Professor.—"They don't know the cause of their discontent. They think that if they could have money and material comforts they would be happy, but we know very well that these things do not bring happiness. It is the insanity of the age, this pursuit of the phantom of material prosperity, it is this that breeds all the selfishness, all the greed and lust of possession. By regarding physical life as all important, humanity has got off the track, has lost the way that leads to happiness. ”

“ Universal Brotherhood, the keynote of the coming cycle! Let its melody be diffused to the four points of the compass from the very depths of our hearts at this important hour at the closing of the year 1898, that it may reach the hearts of other men and women. The time is opportune and propitious, for the whole race has already been touched by the virtue of compassion. ”

“ Tinted with the results of that experience, Spirit, they believe, becomes self-conscious and individualized by its contact with a life or lives of manifestation. Evidently it can never be absolutely stainless again. It has exchanged entire purity for knowledge and self-consciousness. Therefore, man, who is the highest attainment of this evolution, can never be infinitely perfect, but can ever more and more approximate to perfection. He can never again be absorbed and swallowed up and engulfed in absolute divinity. ”

“ Since brotherhood is the ideal, our very institutions, church, state, and particularly the home, exist for no higher purpose than to develop within the soul of humanity a conscious desire to live for others. It is only because the soul manifests itself as two forces, in two sexes, man and woman, that the institution of the home, as we know it, is made possible. We fancy that these dual forces, incomplete and fluctuating, become completed and stable only through marriage. ”

“ Our organization, firmly founded on this high ideal, has sent its tendrils from the bosom of love and sympathy to discouraged humanity through its many channels of dissemination of the sublime philosophy of solace and happiness.
This greatest movement for the redemption of all mankind has been led through the initial stages of development with great success by the Master-hand of Wisdom; all brethren in the work may now take heart and strength from the certainty that the possibility of accomplishment is in sight. ”

“ True it is that our responsibility increases as our knowledge increases and as the knowledge of the physician and surgeon may require him to amputate a limb or give temporary pain in order to save the patient's life, so every true man is a physician and surgeon, first in his own life and then in the lives of others. On the other hand, the true physician will often draw away the mind of the patient from his sickness or disease, and how often can we not help a failing brother by apparently ignoring a fault and calling out the nobler side of the nature! ”

“ The advocate of suicide as the better way to rid one's self of trials and tribulations is necessarily a materialist. He preaches the doctrine of immortality of matter and the mortality of spirit, which is a ridiculous absurdity. But he will discourse learnedly about the milliards of bacilli—separate, distinct, individual, living entities—which float about, live, move and have their being nearly everywhere, but if he were asked to catch a few that they might be seen and handled he would promptly say they were altogether invisible to the naked eye, that they are almost sub-microscopic. ”

“ But the philosophy of the ancients, backed up by the teachings of the divine men who from time to time have come back to us, and endorsed by our own inner convictions, tells us that evolution is the concerted effort of all the atoms that comprise the Universe to return to a condition not recognized by science—the condition of spirit which is the ultimate aim of everything. ”

“ The right counsel of perfection would be, not to avoid them, for the higher we go the more numerous are the people we have to help, and, therefore, preliminarily to judge that intelligent help may be given; but to aim at the exclusion of the personal self from the judgment, making it as lofty as possible. To judge should be to sympathize, that is, to feel like. To judge Smith is to understand him, that is, for a moment to feel as he feels. To compare what I have thus sympathetically ascertained to be his feeling with my ideal of the highest feeling of a judgment on Smith. ”

“ A little time ago we spoke of the lack of true appreciation of art among many of the so-called patrons of art, but surely that must to some extent be passing away, for nearly all the wealthy and even those of moderate means provide that their children shall have some education in art or music. Even in the public schools an important feature is made of drawing and class singing. Surely all this ought to bring about what you desire if your theory is correct, but for my part I cannot see that it will cause any appreciable change, or in any great degree affect the condition of the masses. ”

“ The sentimental condoning of a fault does not help and those who follow a sentimental idea of Brotherhood too often swing to the other extreme and indulge in wholesale and unfounded condemnation, not simply of a fault, but of persons.
Brotherhood is not extreme in either direction. The middle path is the path of Brotherhood, this above all is the path of principle—the path of the principle of love and the principle of justice. ”

“ And thus they go on to infinity, for they can never reach a limit. And the processes of our involution and evolution are only coils of a cycle that has gone on forever and they will continue to form new coils to all eternity.
But the contemplation of the present coil in which we find ourselves involved is quite confusing enough for it extends back farther than our comprehension can grasp and is still very far from finished. It will never be complete until we have all reached our limit of attainment, and that is yet a long way ahead of us. ”

“ According to Theosophy every man is a God incarnate. In his real nature, each man is a spark from the Divine Flame, which descends from the Infinite Fountain of Life and courses through Eternity on a pilgrimage, the purpose of which we can but faintly conceive.
Great mystics have said that "the universe exists for the sake of the soul's experience," and that the purpose of life is that the soul may reach perfection. The term embraces infinity, perfect virtue, wisdom, power, perfect altruism. ”

“ But once the substance of things physical is found to consist in units of force, conditioning space—force-forms as we have called them—of diverse characters, the whole universe of matter becomes a wonderful study, radiant with inspiration, for its solution and meaning are enfolded in its every atom, and in the very attributes by which they are manifested to our sense perceptions they hold and declare their message to the Perceiver within. ”

“ Knowlton.—"Isn't it a law of Nature that the problems of one plane can ultimately only be solved by rising to the next higher plane? And it seems to me that this is one of Nature's methods in evolution, to create discontent with the lower by awakening that which is higher, thus creating a craving for the higher and a consequent output of energy to attain it." ”

“ From God down to the lowest mineral monad, there is a direct chain of heredity, binding all of existence into one great universal whole. Humanity is the child of the Gods and traces its heredity through all the divine hierarchies to the Unknowable Root of all. ”

“ All who desire to learn the mysteries of life, all who desire to advance along the Path which leads from manhood to Godhood are welcome to the archaic wisdom.
If the applicant for divine knowledge will purify his nature and be brotherly to his neighbor, then he may gain the greatest profit by a study of Theosophy, for then its teachings will be illuminated by a greater light than intellect itself can ever shed. The true men of to-day are those who are able to subdue their lower nature and make it obedient to the behests of the spiritual man. ”

“ If we are true to the better side of our own natures we shall soon learn in what true Brotherhood consists. But no one can be a true Brother to another who is afraid to apply the knife to his own failings, or who is not honest in his own endeavors. We students may make mistakes in our acts of Brotherhood, but if we keep in the light of the soul and keep our motives pure the realization of Brotherhood will not be far distant. ”

“ But somehow or some way the average man and woman finds in the so-called philosophy of suicide a most bewitching theme for conversation and discussion, and it is just possible that not a few are persuaded to try the realities of it by letting their minds dwell upon the subject too much. That there is a certain fascination in the problem of life and death, no one will deny, but the thoughtful person would not seek its solution in self-destruction. ”

“ The natural end of a man's pilgrimage in each incarnation is when the spiritual man has so spiritualized his physical body that the spirit can no longer function in it.
Death, then, is surely the spirit walking out of the body by its own free will, just as we lay aside a garment when it is worn out. All other deaths come of violation of nature's laws, and they are premature. It is because we indirectly, at least, commit what is almost the equivalent of what we are wont to call suicide that, in my opinion, we have to come back so often. ”

“ That in some coming age when men, grown weary, heartsick, hopeless, wandering in the trackless waste, shall face again the rising Sun in search of ancient Wisdom and the Truth, then the great Teacher will again appear in human guise, among her own—welcomed by the wise-grown, faithful watchers, rejected and reviled by those who faithless in the past have been—to rear upon the ruins of the old, a new and grander Temple, dedicated to all that lives ”