You cannot run away from a weakness; you must sometime fight it out or perish. And if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?
I put a dollar in one of those change machines. Nothing changed.
We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.
Every positive change — every jump to a higher level of energy and awareness — involves a rite of passage. Each time, to ascend to a higher rung on the ladder of personal evolution, we must go through a period of discomfort, of initiation.
It doesn’t work to leap a twenty-foot chasm in two ten-foot jumps.
He acted too often without counting the cost, from some dazzling conception — one could not say from impulse, for impulses are from the heart. He liked to reorganize and change things for the sake of change, to make a fine gesture. He destroyed the old before he had clearly thought out the new.
When I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in all those assumptions underlining our lives.
So often I heard people paying blind obeisance to change — as though it had some virtue of its own. “Change or we will die.” “Change or we will stagnate.” Evergreens don’t stagnate.
I once listed all the good things I did over the past year and then turned them into resolution form and backdated them. That was a good feeling.
I believe the old cliché “God helps those who help themselves” is not only misleading but often dead wrong. My most spectacular answers to prayers have come when I was so helpless, so out of control as to be able to do nothing at all for myself.
So much that was beautiful and so much that was hard to bear. Yet whenever I showed myself ready to bear it, the hard was directly transformed into the beautiful.
You are a puppet, but in the hands of the infinite, which may be your own.
What’s the actual identity, what’s the actual inner person, is there even an inner self, is there any identity? Anybody’s identity problem is the entire universe; it’s as vast as the entire universe.
I think it not improbable that man, like the grub that prepares a chamber for the winged thing it has never seen but is to be — that man may have cosmic destinies that he does not understand. And so, beyond the vision of battling races and an impoverished earth, I catch a dreaming glimpse of peace.
We speak for the no longer and the not yet.
The whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in one solitary and even humble individual — for it is in the solitary mind and soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost.
I thought I could change the world. It took me a hundred years to figure out I can’t change the world. I can only change Bessie. And, honey, that ain’t easy either.
