
Pythagoras, 4.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 8: Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans
The Manual of the Warrior of Light (1997)
Context: Every Warrior of the Light has suffered for the most trivial of reasons. Every Warrior of the Light has, at least once, believed he was not a Warrior of the Light.
Every Warrior of the Light has failed in his spiritual duties.
Every Warrior of the Light has said "yes" when he wanted to say "no."
Every Warrior of the Light has hurt someone he loved.
That is why he is a Warrior of the Light, because he has been through all this and yet has never lost hope of being better than he is.
Each stone, each bend cries welcome to him. He identifies with the mountains and the streams, he sees something of his own soul in the plants and the animals and the birds of the field.
Then, accepting the help of God and of God's signs, he allows his personal legend to guide him toward the tasks that life has reserved for him.
On some nights, he has nowhere to sleep, on others he suffers from insomnia. "That's just how it is," thinks the warrior. "I was the one who chose to walk this path."
In these words lies all his power: He chose the path along which he is walking and so has no complaints.
Pythagoras, 4.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 8: Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans
§ 1.2
Yoga Sutras of Patañjali
“No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.”
Source: 1790s, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–1793), Proverbs of Hell, Line 15
“He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet's soul.”
"A Little Cloud"
Dubliners (1914)
Context: He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet's soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy. If he could give expression to it in a book of poems perhaps men would listen.
Source: The Income Tax: Root of All Evil (1954), p. 12
Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal (1896)
Context: When a physiologist speaks now of the life of a plant or of an animal, he sees rather an agglomeration, a colony of millions of separate individuals than a personality one and indivisible. He speaks of a federation of digestive, sensual, nervous organs, all very intimately connected with one another, each feeling the consequence of the well-being or indisposition of each, but each living its own life. Each organ, each part of an organ in its turn is composed of independent cellules which associate to struggle against conditions unfavorable to their existence. The individual is quite a world of federations, a whole universe in himself.
“He who reckons his own soul is successful; he who is heedless of it is unsuccessful.”
Muhammad Kulayni, Usūl al-Kāfī, vol.2, p. 111.
Religious Wisdom
Source: The Science of Rights 1796, P. 502, 503, 504