
“The lot assigned to every man is suited to him, and suits him to itself.”
III, 4
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book III
XIV. 228 (tr. Robert Fagles).
Odyssey (c. 725 BC)
Source: The Odyssey
Ἄλλος γάρ τ' ἄλλοισιν ἀνὴρ ἐπιτέρπεται ἔργοις.
“The lot assigned to every man is suited to him, and suits him to itself.”
III, 4
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book III
“To work — to work! It is such infinite delight to know that we still have the best things to do.”
Letter to Bertrand Russell (7 December 1916), from The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, vol. I
F.W. Taylor (1906). " On the Art of Cutting Metals https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015023119582;view=2up;seq=64," Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Vol. XXVIII, 1906, pp. 31–350.
Variant translation: One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought. With this negative motive goes a positive one. Man seeks to form for himself, in whatever manner is suitable for him, a simplified and lucid image of the world, and so to overcome the world of experience by striving to replace it to some extent by this image. This is what the painter does, and the poet, the speculative philosopher, the natural scientist, each in his own way. Into this image and its formation, he places the center of gravity of his emotional life, in order to attain the peace and serenity that he cannot find within the narrow confines of swirling personal experience.
As quoted in The Professor, the Institute, and DNA (1976) by Rene Dubos; also in The Great Influenza (2004) by John M. Barry
1910s, Principles of Research (1918)
Context: Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientist do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.
“That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.”
Marginalia http://www.easylit.com/poe/comtext/prose/margin.shtml (November 1844)
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 106.
XXVIII : The Inner Light of Torah in the Land of Israel, as translated by Rabbi Bezalel Naor, p. 208 http://www.orot.com/lights.html
Orot
Context: The delight of the Torah is ignited by an inner awareness. A man begins to sense the great tapestry of each letter and point. Every concept and content, every notion and idea, of every spiritual movement, of every vibration, intellectual and emotional, from the immediate and general to the distant and detailed, from matters lofty, spiritual, and ethical according to their outward profile, to matters practical, obligatory, seemingly frightening, and forceful, and at the same time complex and full of content and great mental exertion — all together become known by a supernal holy awareness.
Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 226