Neither servility nor arrogance. Neither cringing nor
disdain. Neither excuses nor evasions.
- Your ability to control your thoughts—treat it with respect.
It’s all that protects your mind from false perceptions—false
to your nature, and that of all rational beings. It’s what makes
thoughtfulness possible, and affection for other people, and
submission to the divine. - Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and
remember it: Each of us lives only now, this brief instant.
The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see. The
span we live is small—small as the corner of the earth in
which we live it. Small as even the greatest renown, passed
from mouth to mouth by short-lived stick figures, ignorant
alike of themselves and those long dead. - To the stand-bys above, add this one: always to define
whatever it is we perceive—to trace its outline—so we can
see what it really is: its substance. Stripped bare. As a
whole. Unmodified. And to call it by its name—the thing
itself and its components, to which it will eventually return.
Nothing is so conducive to spiritual growth as this capacity
for logical and accurate analysis of everything that happens
to us. To look at it in such a way that we understand what
need it fulfills, and in what kind of world. And its value to
that world as a whole and to man in particular—as a citizen
of that higher city, of which all other cities are mere