
“A man of understanding has lost nothing, if he has himself.”
L'homme d'entendement n'a rien perdu, s'il a soi-même.
Book I, Ch. 39
Essais (1595), Book I
Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XLII: On Values
“A man of understanding has lost nothing, if he has himself.”
L'homme d'entendement n'a rien perdu, s'il a soi-même.
Book I, Ch. 39
Essais (1595), Book I
Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART II: OTHER WORLDS, Chapter 20. How the Sphere Encouraged Me in a Vision
Context: "Behold yon miserable creature. That Point is a Being like ourselves, but confined to the non-dimensional Gulf. He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception; he knows not Length, nor Breadth, nor Height, for he has had no experience of them; he has no cognizance even of the number Two; nor has he a thought of Plurality; for he is himself his One and All, being really Nothing. Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn this lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy. Now listen."He ceased; and there arose from the little buzzing creature a tiny, low, monotonous, but distinct tinkling, as from one of your Spaceland phonographs, from which I caught these words, "Infinite beatitude of existence! It is; and there is none else beside It."
“a million thousand hundred nothings seem
—we are himself's own self; his very him”
84
95 poems (1958)
“Amongst the sons of men how few are known
Who dare be just to merit not their own?”
Epistle to William Hogarth (July 1763)
The Dragon in the Sword (1986)
Source: Book 1, Chapter 4 (p. 509)
“With an extraordinary persistence he made and kept himself one of the few free men of our time.”
Source: Mohandas Gandhi (1971), p. 3
Context: Gandhi was a completely unofficial man. He recognized the gulf that lay between the enjoyment of freedom and the exercise of authority. When the Indian National Congress, which he had led intermittently as a movement dedicated to achieving liberation by legal and extra‑legal means, itself grasped for power and became a political party, he withdrew. With an extraordinary persistence he made and kept himself one of the few free men of our time.
Source: 1900s, Up From Slavery (1901), Chapter XVI: Europe
Context: In one thing, at least, I feel sure that the English are ahead of Americans, and that is, they have learned how to get more out of life. The home life of the English seems to me to be about as perfect as anything can be. Everything moves like clockwork. I was impressed, too, with the deference that the servants show to their "masters" and "mistresses" - terms which I suppose would not be tolerated in America. The English servant expects, as a rule, to be nothing but a servant, and so he perfects himself in the art to a degree that no class of servants in America has yet reached. In our country the servant expects to become, in a few years, a "master" himself. Which system is preferable? I will not venture an answer.