Mastery

“ Mastery consists not in abnormal dreams, visions and fantastic imaginings or living, but in using the higher forces against the lower—escaping the pains of the lower planes by vibrating on the higher. ”

“ He is, in our old poet’s phrase, ‘constrained by mastery,’ by the mastery of common sense and pleasurable feeling. He is in no hurry to get to the end; for he has a satisfaction in the work, and touches and retouches perhaps a single head, day after day and week after week, without repining, uneasiness, or apparent progress. ”

“ Problems and Powers
We are both masters and servants of our words. How they serve us has been seen. Their mastery over us begins with infancy and ends with death. They are our first teachers, our last counselors. ”

“ But he gloried in his profession, in its labours and difficulties as well as its rewards, it satisfied him intellectually and gave him that calm sense of mastery—mastery over himself and others—known only to those who are doing what they were born to do. ”

“ Thus the mind and character may be trained to an almost perfect discipline, and enabled to act with a grace, spirit, and liberty, almost incomprehensible to those who have not passed through a similar experience.
Everything that we learn is the mastery of a difficulty; and the mastery of one helps to the mastery of others. ”

“ I believe, in other words, that mastery is merely the strength that comes of overcoming and is never a sovereign power that smooths the path of all obstacles. The combinations in art are infinite, and almost never the same ”

“ Put him and his master together, and they form a perfect intellect; but they are separated and without cement; and hence each having a need of the other for its own completeness, each has at times a mastery over the other. ”

“ The heart, and makes the wisest head its sport;
And there’s one rare, strange virtue in thy speeches,
The secret of their mastery—they are short. ”

“ so she handled it with all the grace that belongs to mastery. ”

“ Courage was mine, and I had mystery,
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled. ”

“ Fear not; thy ideal will be reached at last.
To do the grandest work one must needs be
Endowed by Nature for the master task;
Yea more, he must possess the light to see
Those mysteries which nature seems to mask,
And this can gain but in the royal way—
'Tis dread experience leads from gloom to-day.
The Master saw a struggling youth, and smiled,
Pleased with his work in main; but, knowing too
His latent power, if it could be beguiled
From hiding-place, much greater work would do,
He took His servant's hand and led the way
Through vale of sorrow up to brighter day. ”

“ Master. “It will be easy to show you the way of wisdom, provided you seek it purely for God’s sake to preserve the purity of your own soul, and for the love of virtue; if you love it for its own sake, and do not seek in it any worldly honour and glory or, still less, riches or pleasure.”
Dis. “Master, raise us up from the earth where our ignorance now detains us, lead us to those heights of science where you passed your own early years. For if we may listen to the fables of the poets, they would seem to tell us that the sciences are the true banquets of the gods.” ”

“ He shall be your master, but more than master; he shall be your friend, your teacher, your strength, your guide in the days yet to come! To you his life is given. Not for himself shall he live, not for power or oppression, but for service in the good of all! ”

“ The time is coming when, in place of your one master, you will have a thousand masters—masters of duty, of business, of pleasure, and of grief—giving you harder lessons, each one of them, than any of your Fluxions. ”

“ And does he not day by day carefully and faithfully carry out every detail of his master's instructions, looking forward to the time when, perfected through obedience and practice, he shall be himself a master? Where is the man who sincerely aims at excellence in music, painting, literature, in any trade, business, or profession who is not willing to give his whole life to the acquirement of his particular perfection? Shall labor, then, be considered where the very highest excellence is concerned—the excellence of Truth? ”

“ Here, among words, our lot is cast, to make or mar. It is in this obscure thicket, overgrown with weeds, set with thorns, and haunted by shadows, this World of Words, as the Elizabethans finely called it, that we wander, eternal pioneers, during the course of our mortal lives. To be overtaken by a master, one who comes along with the gaiety of assured skill and courage, with the gravity of unflinching purpose, to make the crooked ways straight and the rough places plain, is to gain fresh confidence from despair. ”

“ But one of better taste than common, without forgetting all these, will be able to detect the work of a great master, though faded with the lapse of many years and covered all over with dust. So it is with the poor sinner's soul: it is the work of a great master. ”

“ Master, not of enterprises and institutions, but of the living souls of things which they rudely symbolise; as the Poet is Master, not of words and verses, but of the thing obscurely hidden in them; as the Musician is Master, not of notes and harmonies, but of the soul made audible in them, like an invisible gossamer thread revealed in dew: He teaches by destroying. The history of Man is the history of the Master’s contempt for lies. ”

“ Master is he, thus conscious of life's stress,
⁠Who, year by year thro' toil, a path has found
⁠To best from better, as its vantage ground;
And he whose mission, too, has been far less,
⁠To strive in sunshine, than in shadows grope,
⁠Still finds his heart replete with youth and hope. ”

“ He made our hearts to love him;—our minds to think about him; our eyes to see the beauty of his wondrous works, our ears to listen to his gracious words, and our lips and tongues to be employed in speaking and singing his praises.
We cannot be our own masters. "I am my own master!"—said a young man, proudly, to a friend who was trying to persuade him from doing a wrong thing; "I am my own master!" ”

“ I, with pleasure, impose it on myself as a duty, to urge you, from time to time by letters, to still greater diligence, and also to direct your attention, according to my own views, to all that may facilitate your tuition, and accelerate your progress; though, on the part of the very respectable master to whom your instruction is confided, all will unquestionably be done to cultivate your talent in a way equally tasteful and solid. ”

“ It ought not, therefore, to be without a respectful admiration that we find the masters of the fourteenth century dwelling on moments of the most subdued and tender feeling, and leaving the spectator to trace the under-currents of thought which link them with future events of mightier interest, and fill with a prophetic power and mystery scenes in themselves so simple as the meeting of a master with his herdsmen among the hills, or the return of a betrothed virgin to her house. ”

“ When the hundredth part of you possible masters by proxy shall grow aware of your possibilities, and take your light from under the bushel, and use it to reinforce the flickering flame of talent at your elbow, or to illumine the path of some unfortunate and stumbling genius, or to heighten the brilliance of the consummate master—our civilization will take a mighty step towards God. ”

“ Each has a chance among the rest To do his worst or do his best And his must be the choice,— Either to break the golden rule And cause confusion in life’s school, Or heed the Master’s voice.
The discipline is not severe, Altho’ the Master we should fear To keep us from a wrong; There is no need to sigh and fret, Or to despair, with lashes wet, Because our task seems long. ”

“ Into the world so beautifully valid the master would occasionally walk, inquiring as to what I had done or would do, but bearing on the question with an easy lightness, a friendliness of tact, a neglect of conclusion, which it touches me still to remember. ”

“ I to myself have been master, and have exercised my understanding. Without a teacher I have learnt all; I have armed myself with every weapon, and have won by it the crown which I desired among mankind. ”

“ In whatever rank of life the ‘case’ occurred, if it was one of difficulty or interest, this master of his art was ready with the potent spell of his unerring bistoury, and his reward was in the consciousness of his own power, and in the noble pride of having been ministrant to the relief of suffering humanity. ”

“ You see that, I, that is, this Wisdom, makes a sick man two,—a man beside himself and the servant above his master. When the master is acknowledged the servant is not known, no more than an error is known when the truth comes. I will show my meaning by an illustration: If you believe your lungs are diseased, the servant or belief is the master, and Wisdom the true master becomes the servant; but when the Lord of the vineyard comes, then the wicked servant is cast out and another is put in his place that will render to his Lord his dues. ”

“ Is the master haughty, fierce, and arrogant; the scholar swells with confidence; his eye threatens prodigious things, and his harangue is an ostentatious display of the common-places of school oratory, dressed up with dazzling splendour, and thundered forth with emphasis. On the other hand, does the master value himself for the delicacy of his taste, for the foppery of glittering conceits and tinsel ornament; the youth who has been educated under him, sets out with the same artificial prettiness, the same foppery of style and manner. ”

“ You may be driving sheep, and you shall wander to the city-bucolic and open-mouthed; shall wander under the intrepid guidance of the spirit into the studio of the master, and after a time he shall say, 'I have nothing more to teach you.' And now you have become the master, who did so recently dream of great things while driving sheep. You shall lay down the saw and the plane to take upon yourself the regeneration of the world. ”

“ The worst training of all is to leave him wavering between his own will and yours, and to dispute incessantly with him as to which shall be master. I should a hundred times prefer his being master in every case. ”

“ And one day, when you think it has been conquered, that you have worn it down into oblivion and the dust, and you close your eyes and say, ‘I am master,’ up it springs with fury from nowhere you can see, and catches you by the throat ”

“ If any man shall be master of such a transcendent, commanding, and ductile genius, as to enable him to rise to the highest, and to stoop to the lowest, flights of art, and to sweep over all of them unobstructed and secure, he is fitter to give example than to receive instruction. ”

“ His finished work and Master’s love attest.
And now he wins, withdrawn from human eye,
A good man’s two-fold immortality,
To live forever near the Master’s throne,
And here, in lives made better by his own. ”

“ Each time you do something great and brave, the Master comes a step nearer. When you become your soul, the Master comes all the way down the hill and tells your brain which way to go—tells you the path, the way home. ”

“ He shall have a master to teach him, and in time we shall see whether he is one of the many in whom the divine fire burns, but whose bodies are instruments too coarse to carry out the thoughts of the soul, or whether he is one of the few who are able to do that of which others vainly dream. ”

“ The moment that any idolatrous tension on his personality or his characteristics is set up, the true teacher gives new impulsion to his pupils, sending them forth on their appointed path: "Why call ye me good? There is none good but One, that is God. Call no man your Master on earth; for One is your Master, even The Unseen Unity. ”

“ Till I learn thine incantations,
Learn thy many wisdom-sayings,
Learn the lost-words of the Master;
Never must these words be bidden,
Earth must never lose this wisdom,
Though the wisdom-singers perish. ”

“ Then it will teach us all things, and enlighten our mind and reveal unto us the hidden things of darkness, and give us out of that divine treasure ‘things new and old.’ Resting on God to work in us both to will and to do of his own good pleasure, we ought always to work as diligent servants, that know they have a good Master, that will surely not forget their labour of love. ”

“ Has not each age its special force and manifestation? Are not what we call the different manners of a master, simply the expression of the successive transformations of his being? At thirty, will it be possible for you to have aspired to everything without attaining anything? ”

“ I apply all I have, of talents or means or influence, to doing the will of a Master whose kingdom is not of this world, and whose ways are not liked by the world. I see very plainly what His commands are, and they bid one be unlike the world and separate from it. ”

“ His heart beats as happily in a little while to the new tread along the garden walk. He is still faithful in his allegiance—to the hand that feeds him. When the old master returns he will remember, till then he will philosophize. ”

“ The work our Master has given us to do to glorify him. To fight with evil and overcome it; to endure temptation, and baffle it; to carry our banner of salvation through the thick of the smoke and the fire, and never let it fall. ”