The Almost Perfect State (1921)
Context: The best good that you can possibly achieve is not good enough if you have to strain yourself all the time to reach it. A thing is only worth doing, and doing again and again, if you can do it rather easily, and get some joy out of it.
Do the best you can, without straining yourself too much and too continuously, and leave the rest to God. If you strain yourself too much you'll have to ask God to patch you up. And for all you know, patching you up may take time that it was planned to use some other way.
BUT... overstrain yourself now and then. For this reason: The things you create easily and joyously will not continue to come easily and joyously unless you yourself are getting bigger all the time. And when you overstrain yourself you are assisting in the creation of a new self — if you get what we mean.
“I'll do whatever I can, and leave the rest to God.”
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Bernice King 24
American minister, daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr. 1963Related quotes
“I'll fling a spear myself and leave the rest to Zeus.”
XVII. 515 (tr. Robert Fagles).
Iliad (c. 750 BC)
As quoted in Life on the Circuit with Lincoln (1892) by Henry Clay Witney
Posthumous attributions
By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (1994)
Source: By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
Context: I am going to sit here with you by the river. If you go home to sleep, I will sleep in front of your house. And if you go away, I will follow you — until you tell me to go away. Then I'll leave. But I have to love you for the rest of my life.
As quoted in In Victorian Days and Other Papers (1939) http://books.google.com/books?id=LfIjfuQGwOIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=In+Victorian+days&as_brr=0&cd=1#v=onepage&q=notorious&f=false by Sir David Oswald Hunter-Blair, p. 122
“Do the best and leave the rest.”
Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago
Source: Think Big (1996), p. 46