A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility.
Interpretation
Maintaining a peaceful mind is essential for personal perfection and emotional stability.
This quote emphasizes the importance of maintaining a calm and peaceful mind as a key aspect of human perfection. It suggests that one should not let transient desires or passions disrupt their inner tranquility, highlighting the value of emotional regulation and self-control in achieving a harmonious life.
In practice
In a mindfulness workshop, a speaker used this quote to illustrate the importance of emotional balance.
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of a void, but out of chaos; the materials must in the first place be afforded; it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.
The instructor can scarcely give sensibility where it is essentially wanting, nor talent to the unpercipient block. But he can cultivate and direct the affections of the pupil, who puts forth, as a parasite, tendrils by which to cling, not knowing to what - to a supporter or a destroyer.
What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.
I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine.
Heavy misfortunes have befallen us, but let us only cling closer to what remains, and transfer our love for those whom we have lost to those who yet live. Our circle will be small, but bound close by the ties of affection and mutual misfortune. And when time shall have softened your despair, new and dear objects of care will be born to replace those of whom we have been so cruelly deprived.
Hateful day when I received life!' I exclaimed in agony. 'Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemlance. Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and abhorred.' - Frankenstein
She knew full well the enormity of her offense, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it.
We would rather speak ill of ourselves than not talk about ourselves at all.
We are ever dying to one world and being born into another.
People say that the soul, on hearing the song of creation, entered the body, but in reality the soul itself was the song.
National languages are all huge systems of vested interests which sullenly resist critical inquiry.
A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes' intelligent talk, is always a man who gains something and gives up something. So long as he does both he can create: for he is making an outline and a shape.
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