" S O C I E T Y "

The order of things, is as good, as the character of the population permits.

We have increasingly become a dishonest society. This flaw in our collective character corrodes every mechanism of our society.

The best indication to a person's character is; how they treat people who can't do them any good, and, how they treat people weaker than themselves.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. Krishnamurti.

Society's praise can be cheaply secured, and almost all men are content with those easy merits.

Our politicians have learned from experience, that the voting public would rather hear a lie that sounds good, than the truth which sounds less than good.

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.

As we are, so we associate.  The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile.  Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into heaven, into hell.

Lose no time in setting before you a certain stamp of character and behavior both when by yourself and in company with others. Let silence be your general rule; or say only what is necessary and in few words. We shall, however, when occasion demands, enter into discourse sparingly, avoiding common topics as sports, movies, news; and the perpetual talk about food and drink. Above all avoid speaking of persons, either in way of praise or blame, or comparison.

Laughter should not be much, nor frequent, nor unrestrained.

There are other measures of self-respect for a man, than the number of clean shirts he puts on every day.  Society wishes to be amused.  I do not wish to be amused.  I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred.  I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant. Thoreau.

The mass never come up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.  Hence the mass is only another name for the mob. Thoreau.

In society you will not find health, but in nature.  You must converse much with the field and woods if you would imbibe health into your mind and spirit as you covet for your body.  Society is always diseased, and the best is the sickest.Thoreau.

The flower that is showy but has no, or an offensive odor, expresses the character of too many mortals. Thoreau.

It is only low merits that can be enumerated. A man is a poor creature, if he is to be measured so.

It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions that the herd so diligently follow.

Not to have heard the voice of God and His angels, is the world's idea of sanity. Sri Aurobindo.

A preoccupied attention is the only answer to the importunate frivolity of other people: an attention, and to an aim, which makes their wants frivolous.

As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture. These two modes of thinking are both natural, but the idealist contends that his way of thinking is in higher nature. He concedes all that the other affirms, admits the impressions of sense, admits their coherency, their use and beauty, and then asks the materialist for his grounds of assurance that things are as his senses represent them. But I, he says, affirm facts not affected by the illusions of sense, facts which are of the same nature as the faculty which reports them, and not liable to doubt; facts which in their first appearance to us assume a native superiority to material facts, degrading these into a language by which the first are to be spoken; facts which it only needs a retirement from the senses to discern. Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist. Emerson.

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.

The conditions are hard, but equal.  Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse only.  Thou shalt not know any longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but shalt take all from the muse.  God wills also that thou abdicate a manifold and duplex life, and that thou be content that others speak for thee.  Thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long season.  This is the screen and sheath in which Pan has protected his well-beloved flower, and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall console thee with tenderest love.  And this is the reward: that the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not troublesome, to thy invulnerable essence.  Thou shalt have the whole land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation, without tax and without envy; the woods and the rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt possess that wherein others are only tenants and boarders.  Thou true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord!  Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.

We need each other, forever and always, because we are each other.

   g.wainz@yahoo.com

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