The Dietetics of the Soul; Or, True Mental Discipline (1838)
Niebla [Mist] (1914)
Context: Whenever a man talks he lies, and so far as he talks to himself — that is to say, so far as he thinks, knowing that he thinks — he lies to himself. The only truth in human life is that which is physiological. Speech — this thing that they call a social product — was made for lying.
Beautiful Losers (1966)
Context: What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.
"The Doctrine of Fascism" Firenze: Vallecchi Editore (1935 version), p. 13
1930s
“Man is only miserable so far as he thinks himself so.”
Tanto è miser l'uom quant' ei si riputa.
Ecloga Octava; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), "Mind".
Reflection of Nicol Peters, journalist, in Ch. III
Lazarus (1990)
“Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States!”
As quoted in The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0312340044 (2006), by Ralph Keyes, New York City: St. Martin's Griffin, p. 387
“Maintain the same state of mind in every moment of thought, in every phase of mental activity”
Source: Hsiu-hsin yao lun (Treatise on the Essentials of Cultivating the Mind), p. 126.
Context: Do not try to search outside yourself, which [only] leads to the suffering of saṃsāra. Maintain the same state of mind in every moment of thought, in every phase of mental activity.
Modern Buddhism: The Path of Compassion and Wisdom (2011)
“In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.”
Source: Spinoza in der europäischen Geistesgeschichte
