
Book II, Ch. 49, p. 384
Selected Messages (1958 - 1980)
299
Leaves of Morya’s Garden: Book One (The Call) (1924)
Book II, Ch. 49, p. 384
Selected Messages (1958 - 1980)
Reason and Religion; or, The Grounds and Measures of Devotion. Part I, Introduction, Section VIII.
Remarks in the Senate (August 12, 1919), Congressional Record, vol. 58, p. 3784.
The Never-Ending Wrong (1977)
Context: They both spoke nobly at the end, they kept faith with their vows for each other. They left a great heritage of love, devotion, faith, and courage — all done with the sure intention that holy Anarchy should be glorified through their sacrifice and that the time would come that no human being should be humiliated or be made abject. Near the end of their ordeal Vanzetti said that if it had not been for "these thing" he might have lived out his life talking at street corners to scorning men. He might have died unmarked, unknown, a failure. "Now, we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man's understanding of man as now we do by accident. Our words — our lives — our pains — nothing! The taking of our lives — lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler — all! That last moment belongs to us — that agony is our triumph."
This is not new — all the history of our world is pocked with it. It is very grand and noble in words and grand, noble souls have died for it — it is worth weeping for. But it doesn't work out so well. In order to annihilate the criminal State, they have become criminals. The State goes on without end in one form or another, built securely on the base of destruction. Nietzsche said: "The State is the coldest of all cold monsters," and the revolutions which destroy or weaken at least one monster bring to birth and growth another.
“Faith and devotion are the foundation on which meditation is built.”
Source: Ashtanga Yoga Primer, 1981, p.27
Address at Princeton University, "The Educated Citizen" (22 March 1954) http://infoshare1.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/mudd/online_ex/stevenson/adlai1954.html
Context: What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is, for the most part, incommunicable. The laws, the aphorisms, the generalizations, the universal truths, the parables and the old saws — all of the observations about life which can be communicated handily in ready, verbal packages — are as well known to a man at twenty who has been attentive as to a man at fifty. He has been told them all, he has read them all, and he has probably repeated them all before he graduates from college; but he has not lived them all.
What he knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty boils down to something like this: The knowledge he has acquired with age is not the knowledge of formulas, or forms of words, but of people, places, actions — a knowledge not gained by words but by touch, sight, sound, victories, failures, sleeplessness, devotion, love — the human experiences and emotions of this earth and of oneself and other men; and perhaps, too, a little faith, and a little reverence for things you cannot see.
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 314.
“I will survive, Tracy thought. I face mine enemies naked, and my courage is my shield.”
Source: If Tomorrow Comes
Aurangzeb, just before his death, as quoted from Niccolao Manucci, Storia do Mogor; or, Mogul India 1653-1708 https://archive.org/details/storiadomogororm04manu/page/398/mode/2up, Vol. 4, p. 398.