“Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion, where have these affections and experiences their seat?”

Cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue.

From the Soul using the body as an instrument, it does not follow that the Soul must share the body’s experiences: a man does not himself feel all the experiences of the tools with which he is working.

We may treat of the Soul as in the body – whether it be set above it or actually within it – since the association of the two constitutes the one thing called the living organism, the Animate.Now from this relation.

We ourselves possess Beauty when we are true to our own being; ugliness is in going over to another order.

We ourselves possess Beauty when we are true to our own being; ugliness is in going over to another order; knowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly.

The world is knowable, harmonious, and good.

As in certain combinations so words and in all kinds of music; for melodies and cadences are beautiful; and minds that lift themselves above the realm of sense to a higher order are aware of beauty in the conduct of life.

In actions, in character, in the pursuits of the intellect; and there is the beauty of the virtues.

Become vision itself.

As the eye waits on the rising of the Sun which in its own time appears above the horizon and gives itself to our sight.

And this is the life of the Gods, and of Godlike men, a life without love of the world, a flight of the Alone to the Alone.

The stars are like letters that inscribe themselves at every moment in the sky.

Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.

In this state of absorbed contemplation, there is no longer any question of holding an object in view.

There is one and the same soul in many bodies.

Beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight, but there is a beauty for the hearing too.

I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.

If we can embrace the adventure and risk and equip our churches to lay down their lives and abandon their inherent loss-aversion.

If we could be freed from our aversion to loss, our whole outlook on risk would change.

When we accept life as it is, we can respond appropriately to the way we’re experiencing it, rather than just reacting out of fear and aversion.

The problem is grasping the clock. So what do I do? Let it go, lay it aside – put it down gently without any kind of aversion. Then I can pick it up again, see what time it is and lay it aside when necessary.

This movement of grasping and aversion gives rise to a sense of a separate ‘me,’ and in turn the sense of ‘me’ strengthens itself this way.