“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?”
— Middlemarch
Less Difficult
From “Four Quartets”
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.
— T.S. Eliot
Denial of the self
“The denial of the self has come, as is natural, to mean in general the making of the self thoroughly uncomfortable. That . . . leaves the self still strongly existing.”
— Charles Williams
Simple
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler.” — Einstein
The Alchemist
“I burned my life, that I might find
A passion wholly of the mind,
Thought divorced from eye and bone,
Ecstasy come to breath alone.
I broke my life, to seek relief
From the flawed light of love and grief.
“With mounting beat the utter fire
Charred existence and desire.
It died low, ceased its sudden thresh.
I had found unmysterious flesh—
Not the mind’s [...]
What I do is me
“Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.”
— Gerard Manley Hopkins