
“The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.”
Section 172
Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)
page 73
The Spirit of the Chinese People (1915), Chinese Spirit
“The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.”
Section 172
Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)
VIII. On Mind and Soul, and that the latter is immortal.
On the Gods and the Cosmos
Context: First, we must consider what soul is. It is, then, that by which the animate differs from the inanimate. The difference lies in motion, sensation, imagination, intelligence. Soul therefore, when irrational, is the life of sense and imagination; when rational, it is the life which controls sense and imagination and uses reason. The irrational soul depends on the affections of the body; it feels desire and anger irrationally. The rational soul both, with the help of reason, despises the body, and, fighting against the irrational soul, produces either virtue or vice, according as it is victorious or defeated.
“Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing”
“In art [the Chinese] aim at being exquisite, and in life at being reasonable.”
The Problem of China (1922), Ch. XI: Chinese and Western Civilization Contrasted
1920s
"Karen Armstrong Joins Pangea Day!" (2008) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ5ZmB2kdo0
Context: A project like Pangea, which enables us to enter in to the situations of others, imaginatively, is fulfilling what the religions call the Golden Rule... going into one's own experience, and going into other's experience, and seeing the world from another perspective — that's what we desperately need in our dangerously polarized world.
Letter 2
Letters Written in Sweden (1796)
Context: The more I see of the world, the more I am convinced that civilisation is a blessing not sufficiently estimated by those who have not traced its progress; for it not only refines our enjoyments, but produces a variety which enables us to retain the primitive delicacy of our sensations. Without the aid of the imagination all the pleasures of the senses must sink into grossness, unless continual novelty serve as a substitute for the imagination, which, being impossible, it was to this weariness, I suppose, that Solomon alluded when he declared that there was nothing new under the sun!
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 456.