Inner struggle

“ The indifference, in a large measure of the natural process, the rigid instincts of mere self-preservation, the temptation to smugness and ease, the cold conclusions of the understanding when satisfied with explanations from the physical world, the hardness of the heart—these and many other enemies fight for supremacy, and the soul is often torn in the struggle. ”

“ This overcoming of malice by the power of love, or of evil by "good," in the souls of "the sons of the universe," must not be regarded as a thing once for all accomplished, but as a thing eternally re-attained as the result of an unceasing struggle, a struggle so desperate, so passionate and so unfathomable, that it surpasses all effort of the mind to realize or comprehend it. ”

“ Become examples of dull inertia by grieving over it, or shall we struggle to become men, and through the strength of our mind and bodies, make this a better place in which to live, if only for ourselves? ”

“ In judging of our own powers we are just as likely to under- as to over-estimate them, and the results are equally painful.
How acute are the sufferings of a diffident, shy, self-distrustful, over-sensitive disposition! Such a temperament is a sad make-weight in the struggle of life. ”

“ For the mind, oppressed and weighed down by its sorrows, sinks into a weak and timorous despondency; inclining us to submit, almost without resistance, to the incumbent affliction; or if we struggle at all with it, it is only to ease the labouring heart by putting forth some fruitless sighs and ineffectual complainings. ”

“ Hence the struggle, insistent, ever more pressing, between two sets of desires within the man himself; the feud between the past and the present, between the natural and the social, between the selfish and the ideal. On one side, there is the demand for instinctive satisfaction ”

“ Struggle, constant struggle is the soul of human life, but let the objects of the struggle be humane, and the weapons intellectual. Let us struggle with nature, through whose bounty we are able to achieve a more beautiful and a nobler existence. ”

“ The fact is, the trouble is internal. You must cleanse first the inner man of the heart, and you will be surprised at the reflection of your own face then, it will change into such a mysterious winsomeness! ”

“ Yet all of us are troubled by their struggle, all of us recognize the misery of their surroundings, the paucity of their moral and esthetic inspiration, their lack of opportunity for physical development. All of us have a longing, pronounced or latent, to help them, to alleviate their distress, to better their condition in some, in every way. ”

“ Why struggle to subdue emotional bad habits when a little insight dispels the desire back of them, and makes them melt away as if by magic? For example, why use our will to keep down fear or anger when a little understanding dissipates these emotions without effort? ”

“ Struggle there must be and always will be. The struggle began as purely physical; as man evolved it shifted ground to the mental, psychic, and the spiritual, with a few dashes of cave-man proclivities still left. ”

“ You could face poverty, you could bear bodily pain; the sufferings of the heart were unknown to you; you were then dependent on nothing but your position as a human being; now you depend on all the ties you have formed for yourself; you have learnt to desire, and you are now the slave of your desires. Without any change in yourself, without any insult, any injury to yourself, what sorrows may attack your soul, what pains may you suffer without sickness, how many deaths may you die and yet live! A lie, an error, a suspicion, may plunge you in despair. ”

“ Do you think that such acceptance is more difficult than a struggle against the whole mass of one's habits, waged in doubt and loneliness, and darkened by every kind of spiritual depression, nay more, by remorse; a struggle which leaves a man often in despair, but always loyal to his eternal quest, the discovery of the new paths that lead to the True, the Beautiful, and the Good? ”

“ They thought him quarrelsome, vain, untutored in the forms of civilized life which teach men to ignore much, to endure more, and to reserve the stake of personal feeling and personal struggle for the last and highest emergencies. ”

“ My dear friend, are mental perplexity and despondency, moral difficulty, spiritual apathy, and a general bitter internal struggle with existence, less real trials, less positive troubles, than the most afflicting circumstances generally so classed? ”

“ This is the struggle of the will which each one knows for himself; for who has not had a raging battle of motives occupy the center of the field while all else, even the sense of time, place and existence, gave way in the face of this conflict! This struggle continues until the decision is made, when suddenly all the stress and strain drop out and other objects may again have place in consciousness. ”

“ Fiercely as we human beings [514] struggle to push our way on through the labyrinth of life, their struggles are assuredly no less fierce than ours—one incessant, restless hurrying to and fro, pushing all others aside, to burrow out for themselves what is needful to them. ”

“ The struggle between the insatiable demon of avarice in his heart and all the nobler impulses restraining it is a struggle which is to be seen going on in his thoughts and repeated in his face in every scene in which he appears; and his final despair and remorse are but the natural culmination of the deed which he did only under the temporary control of a passion against which he was all the time struggling, and which he himself held in detestation and scorn. ”

“ I wonder why it is that I must forever feel compelled to take the rough things of the world. Why can't I excuse myself from the overpowering and disagreeable struggles? I can not tell, but after such a day as yesterday, my heart fails me—almost. ”

“ Yet, to a certain extent, an inner consciousness of high aims and disinterested intentions may raise a screen against the base scurrilousness with which every one is assailed at some time in their lives. ”

“ As we lay all the stress on the nature of an act, as seen in the light of consciousness, what does it signify to tell us that another thing, which possesses no such nature, may be efficiently caused? All such illustrations overlook the essential difference between action and passion, between doing and suffering. ”

“ So, if you look at your own life and experience, you will find that some suffer p. 206through a sore struggle with their own temptations, or their own weaknesses—their desires, their appetites, their fears, or the habits they have contracted, and their struggle may be so hard that it needs all the grace of God to keep them firm in their purpose. Some again suffer not from internal but from external hindrances. ”

“ But the more serious source of this inequality is to be found in character and temperament, inbred lusts, passions, tempers, and proclivities which may make the life of a man one long agony of struggle and failure, while another man more fairly endowed may find from the first the way of wisdom a way of pleasantness and all her paths paths of peace. ”

“ With us it is different. In us the impulse, the longing to do something for our people was bom in our own hearts, from deeply rooted conviction, and came through suffering, and through sympathy for the suffering of others. ”

“ Now in all of us, however constituted, but to a degree the greater in proportion as we are intense and sensitive and subject to diversified temptations, and to the greatest possible degree if we are decidedly psychopathic, does the normal evolution of character chiefly consist in the straightening out and unifying of the inner self. The higher and the lower feelings, the useful and the erring impulses, begin by being a comparative chaos within us—they must end by forming a stable system of functions in right subordination. ”

“ But there is another and more impressive aspect: it is the inner life of humanity; it is man's own conscious existence, with its struggles, victories, defeats, its agonies and raptures, its mirth, its play, its sweetness and bitterness. ”

“ In the midst of thy afflictions, nature lends thee no support, no comfort except the advice that thou shouldst yield to them. Obey her dictates, and thou shalt sink into the dust; but listen to thyself, and even in the heart of suffering, thou shalt rise up into higher action. ”

“ What is, is thus independent of our inner conflict, just because this realm of true Being is wholly sundered from the defects of our imperfect apprehension. The Real is that which you would know if you should wholly escape from the limits imposed upon you by the merely inner life of your consciousness. ”

“ And then you will feel arise in you a hungering and a thirsting after righteousness, a spirit of love, and a desire of doing good, which will carry you up and on, above all that man can say or do against you—above all the laziness, and wilfulness, and selfishness, and cowardice which dwells in the heart of everyone. ”

“ However true it may be that sudden shock reveals the hidden motions of the heart, it is also true that a man, if he is a man, may be the victim of the keenest internal struggle without abating a jot of his natural manner, or showing by look or gesture the wild contention raging within him. ”

“ As he resolves, and breaks his resolutions; as he finds evil thoughts and feelings continually coming up from the deep places of his heart; he discovers his spiritual impotence,—his lack of control over what is deepest, most intimate, and most fundamental in his own character,—and cries out: "I am a slave, I am a slave to myself." ”

“ You have come to that period of life at which one cannot escape from a deep sense of responsibility for the formation of one's own character; when, with every power and faculty in a peculiarly excitable state, every nerve vibrates to the slightest touch of joy or sorrow, and one feels perpetually in danger of being led by feeling rather than by judgment. It is a period of intense enjoyment, and for the same reason may be one of intense suffering ”

“ Poverty, care, anger, coldness, and indifference, the rage of passion, the obstinate retention of narrow purposes, indications of change and division in the spiritual world, entire dependence on that of Nature—in one word all that is implied in the transitory condition of human life—leaves its indelible, if quite incalculable, expression on the varied surface of the faces of mankind. ”

“ Poor, silly, idle world, can you never learn that the qualities that make us strong must also make us weak; that the heart that melts at suffering and pain is made of clay so sensitive and fine as to be moved and swayed by all the emotions of the soul? ”

“ Everywhere and at all times are we exposed to the action of these mental and moral spheres, which act upon and impress us in thousands of different ways, now carrying us along in some sudden public excitement in which passion drowns the voice of reason, and now causing us to drift in the wake of some stronger nature than our own whose active thought holds ours in a weak, assenting bondage. ”

“ All we can say is that the good and the bad, the loving and the malignant, the conscientious and the vicious, the educated and the ignorant, actuated by many motives, urged and pushed by circumstances and conditions sometimes in the calm of judgment, sometimes in passion's storm and stress, sometimes in whirl and tempest of insanity—raise their hands against themselves and desperately put out the light of life. ”

“ And nothing but opposition, opposition, opposition now!
Only we advanced thinkers know what it is to suffer! To go through fire for our ideals!
And what is physical suffering by the side of spiritual suffering? ”

“ How poor the scene around, how tame one's own existence, how meagre and faint every power, with these beings in my mind! Often I must cast them quite aside in order to grow in my small way, and not sink into despair. ”

“ It is not life that's complicated, it's the struggle to guide and control life. ”

“ And he adds, “If the trace of the sorrow and activity we have gone through cannot be wiped from our features, it is no wonder that [Pg 121] all that survives of us and our struggles should bear the same impress.” ”

“ And when you come to man, what a chaos of hungers and impulses keep thrusting him through his cycle of quaint tasks! And in every human heart you find some sorrow, some frustration, some lurking pang. ”

“ For an instant she felt the overwhelming discouragement which is the portion of those who approach life not through vision, but through outward events, who seek a solution not in the deeper consciousness of the spirit, but in the changing surface of experience. ”

“ I repeat here what I have said on other occasions—that, after a long experience with men in all conditions of life, after having felt, as most men, the harsh injustice springing from the strife and passion of the world, I have learned to think more kindly of the hearts of men, and to think less of their heads. ”

“ Inharmonious influences are neutralized, the harsh discipline of life is changed to wholesome training, the crooked places are made straight, and the rough smooth.
The uncharitable and censorious are generally found among the narrow and bigoted, and those who have never read the full page of their own heart or been subject to various and crucial tests. How can a man whose temper is phlegmatic judge justly of him whose blood is fiery, whose nature is tropical, and whose passions mount in an instant, and as quickly subside? ”

“ The poverty of thine inner vision of God, purblind as thou art, although He is there, makes thee willing to go out of doors from thine own hearth, refusing to linger within thyself, as in the dark. So thou hast nothing to do but go gaping after the external forms of bodies and the opinions of men. ”