Self-pollination

“ In systematic self-control in the thousand and one claims and demands of life there is genuine heroism. Cultivate that virtue of self-control, not only in physical irregularities, but also in mental excesses and moral aberrations; that thus your growth might be all-round. Let each of you tell himself, 'I shall endeavour to subdue this excess or that exuberance, even because any excess and any exuberance in one direction tells against, retards, the growth in some other direction.' Be balanced ”

“ Every step in the progress of the world has been a new “control.” It has been escaping from the tyranny of a fact, to the understanding and mastery of that fact. For ages man looked in terror at the lightning flash; to-day he has begun to understand it as electricity, a force he has mastered and made his slave. The million phases of electrical invention are but manifestations of our control over a great force. But the greatest of all “control” is self-control. ”

“ The Hermetic Master, or advanced student, polarizes himself at the desired pole, and by a process akin to "refusing" to participate in the backward swing, or, if you prefer, a "denial" of its influence over him, he stands firm in his polarized position, and allows the mental pendulum to swing back along the unconscious plane. All individuals who have attained any degree of self-mastery, accomplish this, more or less unknowingly, and by refusing to allow their moods and negative mental states to affect them, they apply the Law of Neutralization. ”

“ But, if we watch the influence upon the will itself, of its own wrong decisions, its own yielding to temptations, we shall discover that the voluntary faculty may be ruined from within; may be made impotent to good by its own action; may surrender itself with such an intensity and entireness to appetite, passion, and self-love, that it becomes unable to reverse itself, and overcome its own wrong disposition and direction. ”

“ If you would conquer your morbidness, mingle with the bright people around you, no matter how difficult it may be. If you desire the power that someone else possesses, do not envy his strength, and dissipate your energy by weakly wishing his force were yours. Emulate the process by which it became his, depend on your self-reliance, pay the price for it, and equal power may be yours. The individual must look upon himself as an investment of untold possibilities if rightly developed,—a mine whose resources can never be known but by going down into it and bringing out what is hidden. ”

“ Jane," he now looked her fully and seriously in the eyes, "there are lots of people who go through life with tense lines about their mouths, saying nothing, never getting into devilment, and the world tiptoes behind them whispering: 'What wonderful self [Pg 124] control!' It's all rot! Self control is a thing we unconsciously cultivate from the moment our minds begin to coordinate. It's like building a dam across our hidden river of tendency; and a hit or miss sort of structure it is, too. ”

“ Such as I am, I want a soft, clinging element around me, in order to feel gladly inclined for work. This eternal need of self-condensation for the purpose of self-defence supplies me with obstinacy and contempt, but not with the love of expansion and production. ”

“ The individual can attain self-control in great things only through self-control in little things. He must study himself to discover what is the weak point in his armor, what is the element within him that ever keeps him from his fullest success. This is the characteristic upon which he should begin his exercise in self-control. Is it selfishness, vanity, cowardice, morbidness, temper, laziness, worry, mind-wandering, lack of purpose?—whatever form human weakness assumes in the masquerade of life he must discover. ”

“ Yet obviously self- consciousness involves something like a deadlock. For how can one consciously exert himself to be unconscious and try not to try? We cannot arrange our lives so as to have no arrangement in them, and when shaking hands with a friend, for example, be on our guard against noticing. Once locked up in this vicious circle, we seem destined to be prisoners forever. That is what constitutes the anguish of the situation. The most tyrannical of jailers—one's self—is over us, and from his bondage we are powerless to escape. ”

“ It becomes a magnet, a loadstone to draw you. Your constant habit of associating it in your mind with the past, creates around it an atmosphere which is a part of your being and welds you to it, so that you, the house, and the deed, become one mighty monster, inseparable. The idea that you can expiate the deed by this self-torture is vain. You can neither confer good upon yourself nor your victim. ”

“ It is a pity that his self-control so rarely extended itself to acts. But now he was free. Those who have forged their own chains, and lived in a hell of their own dreadful making, can understand what this is and what it means. ”

“ How strange, how irresistible, is the desire of the solitary prisoner to behold some one of his own species! It amounts almost to a sort of instinct, as if in order to avoid insanity, and its usual consequence, the tendency to self-destruction. ”

“ Thus it comes about that self-seeking is destroyed by its own complete development; and upon those who would not voluntarily set themselves any other aim but self, another aim is imposed by alien power. ”

“ From time to time we avenge ourselves for all our enforced concealment and compulsory self-restraint. We emerge from our cells with terrible faces, our words and deeds are then explosions, and it is not beyond the verge of possibility that we perish through ourselves. ”

“ What is self-control? It is nothing but a highly developed vital sense, dominating and regulating the mere appetites. To overlook the very existence of this supreme sense; to miss the obvious inference that it is the quality that distinguishes the fittest to survive; to omit, in short, the highest moral claim of Evolutionary Selection: all this, which the Neo-Darwinians did in the name of Natural Selection, shewed the most pitiable want of mastery of their own subject, the dullest lack of observation of the forces upon which Natural Selection works. ”

“ Setting endeavor in continual motion,” and self-feeling is one of the means by which this diversity is achieved.
Agreeably to this view we find that the aggressive self manifests itself most conspicuously in an appropriativeness of objects of common desire, corresponding to the individual’s need of power over such objects to secure his own peculiar development, and to the danger of opposition from others who also need them. ”

“ A mind so severely trained as his had been brings to a great crisis, involving severe self-denial, an amount of reserved moral force quite inexplicable to those less habituated to self-control. He was like a warrior whose sleep even was in armour, always ready to be roused to the conflict. ”

“ Whether he had called it 'self-realisation' or any less ambiguous name, he would have come to the position that a man feels that he owes it to himself to strive for the best he knows, to 'do his duty for duty's sake,' that he must justify his thoughts and actions to himself—his unsophisticated self,—that, if not, he will feel remorse and guilt. ”

“ Yes, it was trying to get her under, this world with its mighty self-satisfaction, with its smug rules of conduct, all made to be broken by those who strutted and preened themselves on being what they considered normal. They trod on the necks of those thousands of others who, for God knew what reason, were not made as they were; they prided themselves on their indignation, on what they proclaimed as their righteous judgments. ”

“ To dominate oneself to the point of not allowing oneself to become the slave of miserable contingencies which appear as temptations to self-indulgence, and conceal from their pettiness the beauty of the consistent action—this is only given to the chosen few and can only be understood by those who cultivate common sense. ”

“ How poor and dark one's little selfish self seems beside him!"
Diamond slightly raised his eyebrows as he answered, "Powell has undoubtedly very genuine enthusiasm and fervour. But he might be a dangerous guide to undisciplined minds."
"He would sacrifice himself, he does sacrifice himself, for undisciplined and ungrateful minds, with whom, I own, my egotism could not bear so patiently." ”

“ How then is reason to gain control over the appetites? Only by practice. It is only by continual effort, by the constant exercise of self-control, that the unruly passions can be tamed. Once brought under the yoke, their control becomes habit. ”

“ Self-control has a masterful energy when the demand for its exercise is imperative. The paleness went out of Blanche's face, and a tender light came into her eyes as she looked up at Whitford and smiled on him with loving glances. ”

“ But where our feelings are not regulated and controlled, they become unstable and shifting. Like the winds that blow where they list and whither no man can tell, our lack of self-control may drive us to the most violent acts. ”

“ In giving ourselves forth in action, the replenishment comes. The sense of self ceases to clutter the faculties as we bend and toil.
The days that are added to our experience each bring this story in a different way: that the sense of self impedes reality on every hand; that the loss of the sense of self in labour and service renders us instantly quick to the animations of the spirit, without which at least from time to time, a man belongs to the herd, and is lost, like all gregarious creatures, in the will of his superiors. ”

“ We have to be true to all the motives that sanctify our lives. To that extent George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver was undoubtedly right. But the renunciation of the self is not the routine solution of every conflict, any more than is the absolute failure to renounce. ”

“ People who cannot dispense with control after the physical and intellectual police forces have been sprung into the air are people who have dried up their imaginations, stunted their own self powers, people who, lacking the possibility, lost the ability to decide and move on their own. People who cannot dispense with subordination after the whole superincumbent strata of official society have been sprung into the air are human beings who do not consider themselves full human beings, who see themselves through the eyes of their 'superiors' as inferior, as subordinates, as slaves. ”

“ But I’m beginning to believe, Ted, that people who let themselves sink into self-pity and get cynical and rail against the ups and downs of life are only cheating themselves. They’re probably deliberately knuckling under on precisely the load of trial and tribulation they need to make them strong—in this world—or for some other race—on some distant planet—further on! ”

“ Why is it that it is so painful for man to admit that the prime influence in all human endeavor is found in the ego itself, in its desires, wishes, needs and satisfactions, in short, in its need for self-expression and self-perpetuation, the evolutionary impetus in life?
The basis for the unpleasantness of this idea may perhaps be found in an inner resistance in nature itself which forces man to include others in his scheme, lest his own greedy desires should serve to destroy him. ”

“ He could not forget the touch of her arms around his neck, impatiently felt as it had been at the time; but now the recollection of her clinging defence of him, seemed to thrill him through and through,—to melt away every resolution, all power of self-control, as if it were wax before a fire. ”

“ His self-control isn't as complete as most people seem to think it is; he lets go of himself like a petulant child. That must be a new development in him. It doesn't chime with the other things you hear of him as a shrewd, calculating manager, who strikes his enemies in the dark. ”

“ Your self-repression known will yield you glory's gain.
Knowing that self-control is knowledge, if a man should control himself, in the prescribed course, such self-control will bring him distinction among the wise. ”

“ The volition comes, it is represented, as the necessary result—not as a real choice by self-determining personality, but produced by environment, mental structure, and disposition. Not the ego or personal self, as free spirit endowed with capacity for real election, but the environment, motives, and disposition decide and fix the volition for the person, which by an illusion of consciousness appears as done by himself. ”

“ But, in such situations, the greatest and noblest exertions of self-command have little exercise. Under the boisterous and stormy sky of war and faction, of public tumult and confusion, the sturdy severity of self-command prospers the most, and can be the most successfully cultivated. ”

“ Even Renunciation of self is in truth only the casting out of those disturbing and masterful qualities which oppress and hinder the free, natural play of the worthier parts of character. In renunciation we thus restore to self its own diviner mind. ”

“ On the other hand, the capacity for renunciation and self-control, the following of the law of love, the passion for justice and equality, not only grow strong by exercise but, far from injuring the other capacities which it may, on occasion, be right to suppress for their sake, they rather intensify these. As self-indulgence corrupts and fatigues the whole man, even on the self-indulgent side, so duty and righteousness vitalize and brace the whole man, both on their own side and the other. ”

“ To seek self-preservation merely, is the expression of a state of distress, or of limitation of the true, fundamental instinct of life, which aims at the extension of power, and with this in view often enough calls in question self-preservation and sacrifices it. ”