Vicissitude

“ Though my readers will easily suppose that, in the course of a life so full of vicissitude as mine has been, many things must have occurred to mortify and discompose me, nothing has ever depressed my mind beyond a very short period. ”

“ The greatest vicissitude of things amongst men, is the vicissitude of sects and religions. ”

“ We contemplate with anxiety the outward troubles and vicissitudes of human life; but what should we feel if we could behold the inward vicissitudes, the troubles of the human soul?—if we could see how many dangers, snares, enemies, combats, victories, and defeats can be crowded into a day—an hour? ”

“ for such are the vicissitudes of the world, through all its parts, that day and night, labour and rest, hurry and retirement, endear each other; such are the changes that keep the mind in action; we desire, we pursue, we obtain, we are satiated; we desire something else, and begin a new pursuit. ”

“ Hark you, there are vicissitudes in all things. ”

“ See the wrong things slay themselves, leaving only Right;
When this little mortal mind gets the larger view.
Cavillings at this and that, censure, doubt and fear,
Fly, as fly before the dawn, insects of the night;
Life and Death are understood; everything seems clear,
All the wrong things slay themselves, leaving only Right. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The test of progress is the amount of renunciation that one has attained. Where you find the attraction for lust and wealth considerably diminished, to whatever creed he may belong, know that his inner spirit is awakening. The door of Self - realisation has surely opened for him. On the contrary if you observe a thousand outward rules and quote a thousand scriptural texts, still, if it has not brought the spirit of renunciation in you, know that your life is in vain. Be earnest over this realisation and set your heart on it. Well, you have read enough of scriptures. ”

“ What that sensitive mind, and tender conscience, and loving heart, and religious soul, went through even in a few hours, under a situation so sudden and tremendous, is perhaps beyond the power of words to paint. ”

“ This was the experience, then, of ‘distinct pre-eminence’ in whose recollection his mind was ‘nourished and invisibly repaired.’ It is in such a moment that the soul’s strength is shown; when common objects evoke what he calls the imagination, the reality, of which they are a suggestion. ”

“ 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 ”

“ But put yourself in my case, dragging on this dislocated life, sinking deeper and deeper into difficulty every day, continually hoping and continually disappointed, conscious of change upon change for the worse in myself, and of no change for the better in anything else, and you will find it a dark-looking case sometimes, as I do. ”

“ Too much questioning and too little active responsibility lead, almost as often as too much sensualism does, to the edge of the slope, at the bottom of which lie pessimism and the nightmare or suicidal view of life. ”

“ No, after what we have just seen, health is but a name, life is but a dream, glory is but a shadow, charms and pleasures are but a dangerous diversion. Every thing is vain within us, except the sincere acknowledgment made before God of our vanity, and the fixed judgment of the mind, leading us to despise all that we are. ”

“ To adapt ourselves too early to duties, societies, and daily schemes of work in which accident may have placed us, at a time when neither our powers nor our aim in life has stepped peremptorily into our consciousness; [Pg 372] the premature certainty of conscience and feeling of relief and of sociability which is acquired by this precocious, modest attitude, and which appears to our minds as a deliverance from those inner and outer disturbances of our feelings—all this pampers and keeps a man down in the most dangerous fashion imaginable. ”

“ The tiresome routine of my daily life, its dull, unvarying monotony, began to wear into my soul, and I ceased either to think over the past or speculate on the future, but would sit for hours long in a moody revery, actually unconscious of everything. ”

“ Here too, it may be at the end of a long struggle, you have seen—if only in transient glimpses—that after doubt comes reverence, after anxiety peace, after faintness courage, and that out of weakness we are made strong. Suffer these glimpses to become an abiding vision, and you have the supreme joy of life. ”

“ Yet so unconscious were they of weaving this elaborate tissue of illusion around the world they inhabited that they called the mental process by which they distorted the reality, "taking a true view of life." ”

“ As I peer back through the shadow of my years, seeing not too clearly, but through the thickening veil of wish and after-thought, I seem to view my life divided into four distinct parts: the Age of Miracles, the Days of Disillusion, the Discipline of Work and Play, and the Second Miracle Age. ”

“ And now appears the first ray of relief, of recovery, and one of its first effects is that we turn against the preponderance of our pride: we call ourselves foolish and vain, as if we had undergone some unique experience. ”

“ We must answer, it seems to me, ‘Some danger, no doubt, but, granted the ordinary chances of life, not much.’ For, in the first place, that idea which so many critics quietly take for granted—the idea that the gift and the habit of meditative and speculative thought tend to produce irresolution in the affairs of life—would be found by no means easy to verify. ”

“ If, therefore, you permit your mind to be uncultivated and boorish but cherish your body and take thought for it alone, don’t you transfer yourself from the human, into the brute, condition? But let us return to the topic on which we began to speak, for this digression, if I gave way to it, would lead us a 225long way from our purpose. If thou, therefore, yieldest place, and uncoverest thy head, for what do others take you? ”

“ Since life is long, repressions accumulate, the mass of existence of feeling and desire tends to become composed entirely of these repressions, layer upon layer, with every interest in the aggregate striving to attain place in the daylight of consciousness. ”

“ Those which proceed from a diseased mind, occupied with schemes of pride, ambition, grandeur, etc. These, as forming the characteristic conduct of the life, are repeatedly reacted in the deep watches of the night, and strongly agitate the soul with illusive enjoyments and disappointments. ”

“ I felt like I was in control of my life instead of the other way around, like its challenges just bounced off me as I kept doing what I wanted. Normally I feel buffeted by events, a thousand tiny distractions nagging at the back of my head at all times. ”

“ Idle thoughts, critical thoughts of those about us, silly vain thoughts of self,—how covered with confusion and shame we should be if some by-stander were able to look within and see the busy, thronging procession that streams through our mind unchallenged, nay more, welcomed and indulged. ”

“ As far as the rest of life with its so-called "experiences" is concerned, which of us has even sufficient serious interest? or sufficient time? In our dealings with such points of life, we are, I fear, never properly to the point; to be precise, our heart is not there, and certainly not our ear. ”

“ Why sit I here, endeavouring to give form, substance, and duration to images to which it is guilty and opprobrious to allow momentary place in my mind? Why do I thus lay up, for the few that love me, causes of affliction? ”

“ What from a psychological point of view appeared to us as the evanescence, the infinite delicacy, the natural instability, of your selfhood, is now to be viewed, in the light of your ideal, as the essential uniqueness of just your significant experience of selfhood. For just what as mere content is so fleeting, is in the light of the one and unique goal a process tending and striving thither. ”

“ It is an appeal to human experience. I maintain that this modern tendency to talk dogmatically and vaguely about "the evasive fluidity of life" is nothing more than a crafty pathological retreat from the formidable challenge of life. ”

“ When I reach that stage shall I know that Âtman, shall I reach the unconscious state and lose my individuality, or will the knowledge remain with me that I know Him? Will there be no one to recognize, no one to feel, no one to love, no one to hate? ”

“ Thus instructed, in what condition do we find ourselves when we arrive at the age of maturity? Why, just in that divided state of mind, before described, in which the understanding is enlightened while the will is depraved; a state of opposition between the mind and the heart, between our convictions and our inclinations. This we all feel to be, in a greater or less degree, the case. ”

“ Those subject to it yield themselves to it unconsciously; and though it shapes and forms the whole character, until the life becomes crystallized in habit, the influence thus exercised is for the most part unseen and almost unfelt. ”

“ Distractions, tempests, and head-winds in the brain, by-ends, the sidelong eyes of vanity, the overleaping eyes of ambition, the bleared eyes of conceit,—these are they which thwart study and bring it to nought. ”

“ Just as we descend into our consciences to judge of actions which our minds can not weigh, can we not also search in ourselves for the feeling which gives birth to forms of thought, always vague and cloudy? ”

“ I repeat, this depressing and infectious instinct thwarts those instincts which aim at the preservation and enhancement of the value life: by multiplying misery quite as much as by preserving all that is miserable, it is the principal agent in promoting decadence,—pity exhorts people to nothing, to nonentity! ”

“ In the eighteenth century we notice, as we should expect, a considerable increase in the number of these words which attempt to portray character or feeling from within; such are apathy, chagrin, diffidence, ennui, homesickness, together with the expression ‘the feelings‘, while agitation, constraint, disappointment, embarrassment, excitement are transferred from the outer to the inner world. Outlook, which meant ‘a place from which a good view is obtained’, was first employed figuratively by Dr. ”

“ But so long accustomed to suppress emotion and keep down reality, so long schooled for her own purposes in that destructive school which shuts up the natural feelings of the heart like flies in amber and spreads one uniform and dreary gloss over the good and bad, the feeling and the unfeeling, the sensible and the senseless, she had subdued even her wonder until now. ”

“ Melancholy, I suppose, is the curse of the thinking classes; but I confess my soul wears a great uneasiness these days! The sudden and amazing turnover in human affairs, dramatic beyond anything in history, already seems to be taken as a matter of course. ”

“ And here I must make you acquainted with that great mystery which constitutes your despair, since you are ignorant of the malady that devours you. We have a twofold existence, 'm'amie': our internal life, that of our feelings powerfully works within us, while the external life dominates despite ourselves. ”

“ Without disagreeable prolixities and repetitions, it is not in my power to represent what pains I took, in trying so to counteract those occupations which distracted my attention and disturbed my peace of mind, that my heart, in spite of them, might still be open to the influences of the Invisible Being. ”

“ The very consciousness of our weakness and our weariness gives us faith in a higher power, and courage to resign ourselves to the beautiful system of the All, and we feel invigorated and refreshed when, in waking or in sleeping, we have loosened, even for a short time only, the chains which bind our Eternal Self to our temporal Ego. ”

“ The current of human sensibilities necessarily obeys the external influences that supply the sources whence those sensibilities receive their moving power, and which in time engross human attention. Impossible to withdraw ourselves from that light and life whereof we form a part. ”

“ This view, as I hold, is indeed sound in laying stress upon a deep connection between our observation of the significant inner life of our own will, and our assurance that the universe in which we live has true Being. ”

“ The now unclogged mind grasps with vigor any subject presented to it, the spirits are exuberant and the physical frame buoyant. But, is the trouble cured, is it permanently eradicated from the system? ”

“ Therefore we regard our craving with complacence, we feel the great aching of the Want, and we say, with conviction, “I know I exist, I know I am I, because I feel the divine discontent which is personal to me, and eternal, and present always in me.” ”

“ Who but a fanatic could see the work of a special providence, could see anything but the regularity of self-revenging nature, when these exercises, continued without remission till the effect is produced, lead from weakness to exhaustion, and finally to hallucination, fainting, coma, and all the appearance of death? ”