Grains of Salt (excerpt)

Women have flowers. Men have women.

Milk for babes, and tears for strong men. 

We cringe before the moment, and crow before eternity.

Humility works hard to satisfy its pride.

Pride covets Virtue; vanity covets her appearance.

Good men find their greatest pleasure in being virtuous,
while the rest of us find great pleasure a virtue.

We tend to lose sympathy for a man to the extent that his suffering,
having quite overwhelmed him, begins to affect ourselves.

We generally reproach a man for the immodesty of his suffering
when it is ourselves who cannot bear so much as the suggestion of it.

Though you may not always bring your imagination to life,
you may always bring life to your imagination, --
and that is the finer thing. 

I give my Lord this moment, all else I leave to Him.

The earth is a part of you,
no less than the foot that walks upon it.
In fact, you would last longer without the foot. 

Cynicism is the denial of hope by the fear of disappointment.

Substance is the height of style;
good form takes the form of the good.

Patience isn’t waiting for something.

Courage is ripeness of will.

A warm humor satisfies all paradoxes.

Children always think they're playing.

Wise men carve the loneliest paths;
fools are always finding each other.

Some won't drink, but want a drunk.

It is superfluous to judge a man if he is guilty in his own eyes,
and ridiculous if he is not.

The moral sense is strong in some, weak in others,
yet, even in this, the strong still persecute the weak.

Hatred of evil is the craftiest and least well-known of vices,
so easily is it mistaken for love of good.

Asking God for mercy and forgiveness is like asking the sun for light and heat; these belong to the incorruptible nature of divinity itself; and, though clouds of ignorance may cast shadows of guilt over the souls of men, the sun does not go black, nor does the Lord condemn.

In silence there is sweetness.
Words fall, and often rise, into this;
and fall back through, to rise again.

Nothing teaches, and nothing prejudices, like experience.

We walk clumsily in another man's shoes,
when we've yet to remove our own.

Dreams are the rebellion of sleep,
and stars are swords raised against a dethroned sun.

The soul is a fallen woman,
and the Lord, her unlikely suitor.
She eyes Him always with suspicion,
unable to believe that her longing
is answered by His love.
She is coy, elusive, silly.
He is sincere and devoted in pursuit.
By and by, He will win her heart,
and, with it, the dowry of the world.

In the same direction, forgiveness walks,
understanding runs, and love takes flight.

The first requirement for greatness is the audacity to be great;
one must begin upon the heights to ascend beyond the clouds.

The heart is a treasurehouse,
where the sweetest things are preserved.

Inventions are higher discoveries. --
God is our most ingenious invention,
and our highest discovery.

The bell of the world is struck
by the birth of the man, or is silent.

Every head is a headstone;
every body, a grave for restless spirits.

I am a ferment of other minds.

The view that is not represented is never assented to.

My passion is tame. It's my reason that's wild.

Every man's philosophy is his own;
it will never fit anyone so well as himself,
and, even then, it will begin to pinch.

Have you been blinded in the darkest depths?
You will be blinded in the light, as well.
Look around you now.

The nut may not fall far from the tree,
but the roots spread into eternity.

The horizon recedes on the crest of an eternal dusk.

The wisdom of the earth is lofty in the underworld.

The sins of a humble man are always before him,
therefore he judges no one; but a proud man overlooks
his own sins to look upon the sins of another.

A genius is a man who has his madness,
but whose madness does not have him.

We resent the ones
who have given us the most,
for not having given us more;
it is with them that our appetites
and expectations have been spoiled.

The world is a longing for God.

God is a furnace of mystery,
and all creation is burning with questions.

All things speak of God, but the Voice of God is Silence.

Grace is a gust of wind, prayer is a beating of wings.

Speaking well is the art of treating with equal respect
the claims of both honesty and tact.

What is good cannot be true. Only what is great can be true. Truth belongs to the heights. She is free and without purpose, because she is great, and not good; purposefulness is good, but pure being is great. A good teacher teaches with purpose, so that others may learn. But a great teacher teaches for no reason at all, and only because she is a true teacher. What is true has no purpose; this is what it means to truly "be".

Liars are always the last to hear the truths they speak.

To know an aphorism is human;
to know when to apply it, divine.

Who is more unreasonable:
the man who possesses no respect for human life,
or the man who expects it of him?

If a man is unfit to judge himself, who is fit to judge him?

A man who judges thinks he can enforce the laws of righteousness
by sacrificing the first among them.

Ask yourself if you are dreaming and, at once, you begin to awaken.

We are frequently engaged in many places at once, and present nowhere.

Our broken songs are half-composed,
and we ourselves, half-composed;
we sing ourselves,
and sing ourselves completely.

Great truths are dropped from great heights,
so they are sure to crush a few egos.

He has courage to attack who lacks courage to defend.

It is easy to disregard a man's objection, and to rise above his offense, if we consider him a simple lunatic or brute. It is only to the extent that we respect him or his opinion, that we may even be provoked by them at all. We must have some humility for our pride to be stung.

There is divinity in idealism; to have an ideal is not to be godless, --
and it is a kind of blessedness to remain faithful to one's ideal.

To admit when you are wrong,
suggests that it is not your pride
which insists on being right.

Every school should have a garden.

Every word is an Arcanum.

Reason is to revelation
what the mind is to the soul.
Reason mediates revelation:
mind mediates soul.

Form is modest, beautiful and deep, like silence.

For men of action, simplicity is character;
for men of thought, it is suicide.

The essential difference between a philosopher
and someone who is not a philosopher is this:
Both have a head full of contradictory and irreconcilable points of view,
but the philosopher knows it, -- and, beyond knowing it,
embraces this conflict as the fountainhead of creative thinking.

There is no such thing as "the last word", in wisdom, or in anything else. Even conversations continue when those who conversed have gone their separate ways. And there may be systems of philosophy, and men who claim to belong to them, but this is also a fib. No man has ever agreed on the essential points with any other man who has ever lived. Not entirely. We may have to dig for him, but we always find the individual. Though he surrender his reason to the common faith, he cannot silence the mind which whispers even out of the deep unconscious; and every mind is uniquely formed.

I’ve not chosen a religion, but I’ve tasted the many cups.
To drunkards who protest that I drink not, but merely swish and spit,
I say, “Perhaps I am a connoisseur.”

They wear crosses like anchors around their necks,
and fall on their knees like ships run aground;
their hands, joined in prayer, fork the sand:
"Lord, deliver us from oceans, though we be ships!"

There are those who see shipwrecked men,
and say, "The sea is off-limits to sensible men."
Perhaps it is so, and I would rather be senseless.

The truth of love, spoken clearly, is like a great flood, purging the land of all that is merely superficial and unrooted in the natural order. Nothing false can stand in its wake. The mouths of the foolish and the wicked are stopped, and the tides of ignorance and animosity ebb like phantoms in the morning light. Only the truth of love has this magnificent cleansing power. But it must be spoken. It must never be silent.

Silence is the wisdom of the foolish and the folly of the wise.

If fools could be silent, wisdom could speak.

That which is mortal in us is undisturbed by loud noises and harsh words. Being of the same nature as these, it will only grow louder and more harsh itself, in order to accommodate them. But that which is divine is truly delicate. The slightest noise, the merest hint of discord, is enough to dispel it. A mound of stones is not upset by a strong wind, but a mound of powder is lost in the weakest breeze. Though we may not disturb what is coarse by behaving in our usual way, we must take greater care not to disturb what is fine. So it is that we must be gentle with one another, not for the sake of what is mortal, but for the sake of what is divine.

Like a vagrant,
I fall asleep on the steps of my prayer,
and never ascend to the door of His love.

A thousand unlocked doors between us,
but I still search for a key.

To be precise, Lord, I do not believe
in the peacefulness of your kingdom,
but in the kingdom of your peace.

Fools will say that you are most yourself
when you are least in control of yourself.

The very sunlight which pours through our hands is pure gold,
and the very idea of love is love freely given.