Life plan

“ Save for very exceptional reasons, a plan of life which ignores the primary demands of the body, leads to ill health or a constant overdrain of energy, encourages low spirits and depression, is a plan which we can say beforehand is not going to work in practice. ”

“ It does not follow that we are to live at random, without ever giving a thought to our health. There is a plain middle course. Guided by our own experience, and by the experience of those that have gone before us, we arrange our plan of life so as to preserve health ”

“ The perfect plan includes health, wealth, love and perfect self-expression. This is the square of life, which brings perfect happiness. ”

“ Throughout these tales the plan has been to present a picture of ordinary life, with its small daily events, its pleasures, and its trials, so as to draw out its capabilities of being turned to the best account. ”

“ This will give you the model of a perfect life and enable you to live so as to make your life glorious while upon the earth, and prepare you for an eternity of happiness and joy beyond this world. Have a plan and live to it, and let your plan include eternity. And may God give you grace to live up to a high ideal, to be noble Christian men and noble Christian women.
Questions.—What are needed before a house is built? Are all boys and girls builders? Builders of what? Do they need plans? Should we all have a main object in life? ”

“ He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. ”

“ Prepare to die, is not the exhortation in this Church and Kingdom; but prepare to live is the word with us, and improve all we can in the life hereafter, wherein we may enjoy a more exalted condition of intelligence, wisdom, light, knowledge, power, glory, and exaltation. Then let us seek to extend the present life to the uttermost, by observing every law of health, and by properly balancing labor, study, rest, and recreation, and thus prepare for a better life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As the seed is cast into the bosom of nature in order that its energies may be called forth and its destinies accomplished, so do you cast yourselves into active life, determined in it to exercise, and by exercise to increase those mental powers that the training of the past has given you—determined that by continual accessions to your knowledge, the stream of thought shall be kept flowing constantly within you and bearing health, activity and growth into the very recesses of your being. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Was it that the struggle of things to survive produced as a sort of necessary by-product these intense preferences and appreciations, or was it that some mystical outer thing, some great force, drove life beautyward, even in spite of expediency, regardless of survival value and all the manifest discretions of life? ”

“ The larger this triangle is, the better will be the health, for the reason that the Line of Health will be further removed from the Life Line. The views of life will also be broader and the field of action as it were less limited. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If all the discussions upon health and long life, from the earliest time to the present, could be adequately chronicled they would form an interesting, if not an amusing history. In many of these, however, we should find the same serious thoughts which we may well consider and find by comparison a few points in which all agree as to what is necessary to health, happiness and length of days. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In this baffling but wonderful domain I am inspired by the ambitious hope that some, at any rate, of the many unsolved problems of the Science of Life may yet give up their secrets to the demand of my persistency, exerted in the interest of the well-being of humanity. ”

“ If we ask how we must live to secure the best health and longest life, the answer must be drawn from physiological knowledge; but if we ask how long the best mode of living will preserve life, the reply is, Physiology cannot teach you that. ”

“ We do, however, know positively certain laws and their action and certain rules of procedure in the adjustment of exterior conditions, favorably or unfavorably, and in supplying the necessaries of wholesome life. We know, in a general way, what should be the methods of life, of diet, of exercise, of use of powers of body and of mind. ”

“ The Line of Life, it must be remembered, merely relates to the promised length of life from heredity and natural causes, but the Line of Health denotes the effect of the class of life the subject has led. ”

“ First, a healthy body; second, an active mind in sympathy with the past, the present, and the future; thirdly, occupation fit for a healthy body and an active mind; and fourthly, a beautiful world to live in.
These are the conditions of life which the refined man of all ages has set before him as the thing above all others to be attained. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If we take normal physical, mental and moral exercise, this energy will be conserved in the blood, which is the life, and directed so as to produce a perfect development. Sin alone has brought conflict and inharmony into our three-fold nature and prevents perfect happiness and perfect development. ”

“ I am, therefore, but as a draughtsman, who, knowing somewhat your desires and aspirations, have drawn a plan, which you in your wisdom can modify, improve, perfect. In this I know we are of one mind, that though the ideal we all of us hold be never reached during our lives, we shall continue to work successfully for its realisation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is thus, apparently, that a return to this earliest stage of our existence has come to stand as the supreme goal and object of all desire to escape from the turmoil, labour and conflict which developed life inevitably brings in its train. ”

“ The second point is the proper and healthy physical and mental development of all our faculties, in the interest of these higher aims. We are not to live with this better conception of life in cloisters or studies, but as far as possible to bring it [119] into use in our ordinary life and in every calling—but not, of course, in any calling that stands in radical opposition to this better conception of life. ”

“ And he further adds that each additional year's labor, in this special field of investigation, "only confirms him more strongly than ever in the opinion that the physical doctrine of life cannot be sustained." ”

“ And to it, as well as to life in the bare physiological sense, the principle of continuity through renewal applies. With the renewal of physical existence goes, in the case of human beings, the re-creation of beliefs, ideals, hopes, happiness, misery, and practices. ”

“ On this plane we are able to concentrate our energies on the finer ends of life, because we may reasonably expect to be no longer hampered by the ever-increasing burdens which were placed upon us by the failure to control life; while the more we succeed in our efforts to purify and strengthen life, the more magnificent become the tasks we may reasonably hope to attempt and compass. ”

“ 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. ”

“ These are the considerations that have in fluenced me to co-operate with the life extension movement, and to commend this volume to the earnest consideration of all who desire authoritative guidance in improving their own physical condition or in making effective the knowledge now available for bringing health and happiness to our people. ”

“ We hope this period will settle the question, Which is the master of health, happiness, and being, — mind or body? Not a blade of grass springs up, or a spray buddeth within the vale, or a leaf unfolds its fair outlines, or a flower starts from its cloistered cell, only as the result of mind. ”

“ In our own day the crumbling of the formal religious belief that this life is but a preparation for that beyond the grave and the centering of our efforts to make it as much of a success as possible, the growth of wealth and leisure and the pursuit of sensual pleasure, these various motives, high and low, combine to exert a pressure upon medicine which is scarcely equaled in other professions. ”

“ It might begin with the child, because we all begin that way; it might begin with love, because that precedes the child; it might begin with the care of the body, explaining that sound physical health is the basis of all right living, and even of right thinking; it might begin as most philosophies do, by defining life, discussing its origin and fundamental nature. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So it is with more involved phenomena. Just as we here find that, throughout both its physical and intellectual divisions, healthful life implies continuance of the established successions of antecedents and consequents among our vital actions; so shall we find it throughout the moral division. In our dealings with external Nature and our fellow men, there are relations of cause and effect, on the maintenance of which, as on the maintenance of the internal ones above instanced, life depends. ”

“ By reasoning of this sort, Physicians and Astrologers trace back the origin of our natural habits to our primal qualities, to the training of our will, and to our occupations and conversation. In every man all these are found in proper ratio to the time of life of each individual ”

“ In the spiritual world there are sanitariums for such as these, and when the spirit, weak and feeble, exhibits a desire to become strong and healthy, and to be placed under conditions that will afford the means of growth, unfoldment, and of gaining power, he or she 173may be conducted to one of these beautiful places, where only life, health, enjoyment, mental vigor, and happiness can be obtained. ”

“ There are three kinds of lives, corresponding to the three kinds of metempsychosis, ascending, circular, descending: the aspiring life of progress in wisdom and goodness; the monotonous life of routine in mechanical habits and indifference ”

“ The whole journey of life on the physical plane here below is so designed and planned as to make the natural aging and decay of the physical body supplement, unfold and develop the Spiritual Body, through the right use of the faculties, capacities, and powers of the Human Soul—the Individual Intelligence.
These are aspects, uses and powers of that subtle something we call Life; that Principle that
Normal use that insures growth and development, range and power of action, is also, from first to last, a refining process ”

“ Life, Health, Happiness—that vital interdependent triad—are surely a preoccupation strong enough and precious enough to startle the minds of the most complacent; and it is with the object of awakening all to their possibilities—in health or in disease—of protection of the one, and hope and regeneration under the other, that the course of study has been inaugurated of which the following is but a bare outline. ”