Active life

“ Plenty of moderate exercise out of doors, active intellectual interests, both just to the point of healthy fatigue but no more, are fundamental. One must have insight and considerable power of self-observation to profit therefrom. ”

“ He tells us that he rides without assistance, climbs hills, is never perturbed in soul, is occupied during the entire day, changes his residence in warm weather to the country which he thinks important, enjoys the society of able, cultivated, and active-minded men, and all his senses have remained perfect. ”

“ When one remembers how full life is of appeals to the active faculties of man, and how the exertion of each of these brings its correlative satisfaction; how the world, in the first place, needs the daily labour of the majority of our race ”

“ The range of individual differences in this respect is enormous; but whatever the mixture of yeses and noes may be, the person is infallibly aware when he has struck it in the right proportion for him. This, he feels, is my proper vocation, this is the optimum, the law, the life for me to live. Here I find the degree of equilibrium, safety, calm, and leisure which I need, or here I find the challenge, passion, fight, and hardship without which my soul's energy expires.
Every individual soul, in short, like every individual machine or organism, has its own best conditions of efficiency. ”

“ Exercise and Mental Vigor—Do you know that it is your privilege so to live that your minds may all the time be perfectly within your control? Study to preserve your bodies in life and health, and you will be able to control your minds. ”

“ He recognized that work for the body and work for the mind must be balanced, and he evolved an acrostic to be followed as a rule of life, the fulfillment of which has meant prolonged years of efficient work and has kept the freshness of middle life with the advancing years. ”

“ But the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours,—as the swinging of dumb-bells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life. Think of a man's swinging dumb-bells for his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures unsought by him! ”

“ If successful they were at work early and late, cheerful, well, and energetic.
Every pursuit that ennobles and elevates the mind, tranquilizes the system, enhances the general health, and prolongs life. ”

“ He is even rewarded for the proper discharge of those functions; and all the natural exercises which relate to himself, as well as to his fellow creatures, not only occupy without distressing him, but, in many instances, are attended with positive pleasures, and fill up the hours of life with agreeable occupation. ”

“ But these wanderings in the soul's workshops, and these analyses of the forces that play on it, give us far too cold or too technical a view of that richly various and dynamic thing, the real regenerated life. ”

“ The exercise of every sense is pleasurable,—the exercise of sight, hearing, taste, touch, and muscular effort. What can be more pleasurable, for instance, than the feeling of entire health,—health, which is the sum-total of the functions of life, duly performed? "Enjoyment," says Dr. Southwood Smith, "is not only the end of life, but it is the only condition of life which is compatible with a protracted term of existence. ”

“ All their own activities are instincts of the body for its growth in strength; but you should regard with suspicion those wishes which they cannot carry out for themselves, those which others must carry out for them. Then you must distinguish carefully between natural and artificial needs, between the needs of budding caprice and the needs which spring from the overflowing life just described. ”

“ Tell me, do you make constant use of exercise? It is all I have to trust to, though not in regard to life but to health: I know nothing wherein years make so great a change, as in the difference of matter in conversation and writing. ”

“ What may be meant by this idea of 'fitness'—which meets us in the famous phrase that the 'survival of the fittest' in the struggle for life is the goal of evolution—is a question which brings us at once to the consideration of the ethical significance of the theory. ”

“ Experience and study have supplied something to give, mental discipline and unimpaired physical strength supply the power for service, the broad outlook reveals the need and place of service, and the soul's awakening toward God and the neighbor have supplied the motives for service.
(2) Physical and mental power at the height. Waste and repair in bodily tissues are balanced during the prime of life. If development has been normal, the will is resolute, and judgment and reason are dominating and wise, for experience has given large data from which to draw conclusions. ”

“ TO THINK QUIETLY, ACT FRANKLY, TALK GENTLY. To exercise in this way the brain that is given to us is to lead the life of a MAN, a life of self-control, a life that is worth while, that leads to something and helps forward the improvement of the race. ”

“ Recognizing that health of mind and body is one of the most valuable of all personal assets, make every reasonable effort to maintain intact, and, if possible, increase the capital of physical and mental strength. ”

“ Why can we not get along with just those that we use for getting food, for avoiding harm, for play, and for the other activities which they carry on? The answer to this question is found in the fact emphasized above that continuous power development is necessary to continued life. ”

“ Result of Physical, Mental and Moral Development Is Increased Capacity. — The ultimate result of all this physical improvement, mental development and moral development is increased capacity, increased capacity not only for work, but for health, and for life in general. ”

“ By such strong and nicely-fitted movements of the machine of Providence it is, that the tasks of life are distributed where best they may be performed, and its burdens apportioned where best they may be sustained. ”

“ And as a fact, in normal cases, to will and to observe that our efforts are to a certain degree efficacious, at least in controlling bodily movements, or in directing the course of our inner life, are actually very closely related processes. ”

“ Movement is the condition of life, anyway. Set the currents going in the air, in the water, in the body, in the mind, in the community, and a healthier condition will follow. Change, diversity, activity, are the prime conditions of life and health everywhere. Persons with doubts and perplexities about life go to work to ameliorate some of its conditions, and their doubts and perplexities vanish—not because their problems are solved, as they think they are, but because their energies have found an outlet, the currents have been set going. ”

“ La condition par excellence de la vie, de la 30 santé et de la force chez l'être organisé, est l'action. C'est par l'action qu'il developpe ses facultés, qu'il en augmente l'énergie, et qu'il atteint la plénitude de sa destinée—The chief condition on which depends the life, health, and vigour of an organised being is action. It is by action that it develops its faculties, that it increases its energy, and that it attains to the fulfilment of its destiny. ”

“ As soon as he was free for the use of his limbs, for the training of his senses, and for the gaining and exercise of physical strength, his prospective range and method of life, with the conditions under which it was to be passed, decided what he was to learn and practise. ”

“ But to speak more closely of the matter in hand, let me name some of the considerations which must enter into the choice of a life-work. I can only speak in the most general way, addressing as I do young men of varying abilities and temperaments. If one should discuss the value or attractiveness of any particular vocation, the personal element and the question of individual fitness would instantly come in. ”

“ The balance of mental and social, as well as of physiological, functions, is implied in the complex life of whose evolution we form a part. To say that we are to promote this balance of various functions, is to say nothing more than that we are to promote the life into which physical and mental and social factors enter. ”

“ He only is independent in action who has been earnest and thorough in preparation and self-culture. "Not for school, but for life, we learn"; and our habits—of promptness, earnestness, and thoroughness, or of tardiness, fickleness, and superficiality—are the things acquired most readily and longest retained.
To vary the language of another, the three great essentials to success in mental and physical labor are Practice, Patience, and Perseverance, but the greatest of these is Perseverance. ”

“ Carry the Universal Life with you as much as possible into your everyday life. It belongs there as much as anywhere, and will prove to be a tower of strength and refuge to you in the perplexing situations of your busy life. ”

“ For a purpose is the tendency to realize some external action which is useful or indispensable to the life-existence of the particular individual being. The tendency to the maintenance of a definite activity in opposition to the onset of disturbing forces of the environment in order to restore the lost equilibrium, may be considered as the universal formula for purposive life in general. ”

“ With those qualities your race can easily double its present span of useful life. Physical exercise to maintain the bodily tissues at their best, and mental relaxation following mental toil—these things are the secrets of a long and productive life. ”

“ The lowest round it may be, but yet it is the lowest round, the necessary step to all the rest. For it is not too much to say that, in our present state of being, intellectual, moral, even spiritual life and progress depend greatly upon physical conditions. ”

“ Let the body work with the mind, and let them both labor fairly together, and, with but few exceptions, you will have a strong-minded, athletic individual, powerful both physically and mentally.
When you find the thinking faculty perfectly active, in a healthy person, it should put the physical organization into active operation, and the result of the reflection is carried out, and the object is accomplished. In such a person you will see mental and physical health and strength combined, in their perfection. ”

“ It is rather an indication which shows how healthy, and deeply implanted in the substance of human life, are the roots of this movement; and it places it in a line with all those vast controlling movements which have in the course of the ages reorganised human life. ”

“ The implication of such a balance is that the several functions in their kinds, amounts, and combinations, are adjusted to the several activities which maintain and constitute complete life; and to be so adjusted is to have reached the goal towards which the evolution of conduct continually tends." But completeness of life means primarily the completeness of life in each individual organism as regards its continued existence, and the full satisfaction of all its functions during the period of its existence. ”

“ And he puts into practical life what another of our sages well expressed when he said: “Occupation and exercise are the hand-maidens of purity and strength.” Too often we merely read these wise words. ”

“ Your inward trains of thought, your faculties, and your feelings, will be preserved in a fitness and, as it were, contempered to a life of ease, and capable of enjoying leisure, because both able and disposed to employ it. Secondly, while you thus render future affluence more and more desirable, you will at the same time prevent all undue impatience, and disarm the temptation of poisoning the allotted interval by anxieties, and anxious schemes and efforts to get rich in haste. ”

“ Plasticity or the power to learn from experience means the formation of habits. Habits give control over the environment, power to utilize it for human purposes. Habits take the form both of habituation, or a general and persistent balance of organic activities with the surroundings, and of active capacities to readjust activity to meet new conditions. ”

“ Therefore, in every organic movement we may perceive the activity of the internal motive forces which are peculiar to life, and the influences of the ground to which the life is attached. In the movements of peoples, the internal forces are the organic powers of motion common to all creatures, and the spiritual impulses of the intellect and will of man. ”

“ Those individuals whose single strength is supplemented by the aid of others must succeed best in the struggle for existence. Moreover, with the exercise of altruistic forms of action, we must suppose pleasure in its exercise to increase, in so far as we suppose any consciousness at all in the animal performing the action. The greater the degree of exercise, the greater the pleasure connected with the action, and the more readily the organism will respond to conditions permitting its accomplishment; while repetition, again, must increase tendency to repetition. ”

“ You can picture yourself as walking down the street with an erect body and a vigorous stride; you can picture yourself as doing your day's work easily and with surplus vigor, never tired or weak; you can picture in your mind how all things would be done by a person full of health and power, and you can make yourself the central figure in the picture, doing things in just that way. ”

“ The effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty years—these fifteen golden years of plenty, the anabolic or constructive period, in which there is always a balance in the mental bank and the credit is still good. ”

“ In the education of the individual for his life-work in a network of social relationships play is a most important form of organic exercise,—a most important method of realisation of the social instincts; gives flexibility [Pg 29] of mind and body with self-control; gives constant opportunity for imitative learning and invention, and is the experimental verification of the benefits and pleasures of united action. ”