... to be successful a person must attempt but one reform. By urging two, both are injured, as the average mind can grasp and assi...milate but one idea at a time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent--unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaust it--we perpetuate it within o...urselves like a temptation and enthrone it at the very heart of our solitude.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great end of life is not knowledge, but action. What men need is as much knowledge as they can assimilate and organize into a ...basis for action; give them more and it may become injurious. One knows people who are as heavy and stupid from undigested learning as other are from over-fulness of meat and drink.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When one has once accepted and absorbed Evil, it no longer demands the unfitness of the means. The ulterior motives with which you... absorb and assimilate Evil are not your own but those of Evil.... Evil is whatever distracts. Evil knows of the Good, but Good does not know of Evil. Knowledge of oneself is something only Evil has. One means that Evil has is the dialogue.... One cannot pay Evil in installments--and one always keeps on trying to.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our institutions have a potent digestion, and may in time convert and assimilate to good all elements thrown in, however originall...y alien.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we can, when we have established individual discipline, arrange the children, sending each one to his own place, in order, tryi...ng to make them understand the idea that thus placed they look well, and that it is a good thing to be thus placed in order, that it is a good and pleasing arrangement in the room, this ordered and tranquil adjustment of theirs--then their remaining in their places, quiet and silent, is the result of a species of lesson, not an imposition. To make them understand the idea, without calling their attention too forcibly to the practise, to have them assimilate a principle of collective order--that is the important thing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The life and vigor of poetry consists of the fact that it steps out of itself, tears out a section of religion, then withdraws int...o itself to assimilate it. The same is true of philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years, but seems to contain the whole passio...nate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island. In this cry of pain the inner consciousness of the people seems to lay itself bare for an instant, and to reveal the mood of beings who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »