Even the existence of this corporeal element, low as it in reality is, because it is the source of death and all evils, is likewise good for the permanence of the Universe and the continuation of the order of things, so that one thing departs and the other succeeds.
Contrast the experience with something worse and you cannot help feeling happy and grateful because. The change from trouble to comfort gives us more pleasure than uninterrupted comfort does.
The great sickness and the grievous evil consist in this: that all the things that man finds written in books, he presumes to think of as true-and all the more so if the books are old.
One should see the world, and see himself as a scale with an equal balance of good and evil. When he does one good deed the scale is tipped to the good – he and the world is saved. When he does one evil deed the scale is tipped to the bad – he and the world is destroyed.
The knowledge of God, the formation of ideas, the mastery of desire and passion, the distinction between that which is to be chosen and that which is to be rejected, all these man owes to his form.
