The order of things, is as good, as the character of the population
permits.
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.
We have increasingly become a dishonest society. This flaw in our collective character corrodes every mechanism of our society.
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.
Society's praise can be cheaply secured, and almost all men are content with those easy merits.
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.
He who does not have trust in others, should not himself be trusted.
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 gladiators, horse-races, athletes; and the perpetual talk about food and drink. Above all avoid speaking of persons, either in way of praise or blame, or comparison.
If you can, win over the conversation of your company to what it should be by your own. But if you find yourself cut off without escape among strangers and aliens, be silent.
Laughter should not be much, nor frequent, nor unrestrained.
Banquets of the unlearned and of them that are without, avoid. But if
you have occasion to take part in them, let not your attention be relaxed
for a moment, lest you slip after all into evil ways. For you may rest
assured that be a man ever so pure himself, he cannot escape defilement
if his associates are impure.
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.
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.
As far as society is concerned, the most talkative are the least intelligent, and there is hardly a difference between an orator and an auctioneer.
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.
The intellectual level of the average man, or public thinking, is at best infantile or trivial, at worst, animalistic and decadent.
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.
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.
The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation!
The flower that is showy but has no, or an offensive odor, expresses
the character of too many mortals.
It is only low merits that can be enumerated. A man is a poor creature, if he is to be measured so.
Let not society be the element in which you swim, or are tossed about
at the mercy of the waves, but be rather a strip of firm land running out
into the sea, whose base is daily washed by the tide, but whose summit
only the spring tide can reach.
Morality is a set of laws or conditions, under which a stable system can
exist. Many people tend to think of morality as the absolute truth and how
the universe should be governed. However, I do not agree with that view. I
believe that morality is merely a tool for maintaining a stable system and
that
there can exist more than one stable system. For instance, it is obvious
why killing a fellow human being is immoral in our system. It is because if
murder is not restrained then everyone in the society will be killed and
nobody will be left to defend the set of rules which define the morality of
that system. However, if it becomes possible to maintain what appears to be
an unstable system, e.g. by creating a more complex set of rules, then those
rules which hold together the system become The Moral code of conduct for
that system. For a more pragmatic and less offensive illustration of the
arbitrary nature of morality, imagine a race of people, who have a very low
fertility rate, whose population is waning. To avoid extinction, the practice
of polygamy may be encouraged under such circumstances. In this society,
polygamy would not be labeled as being immoral. Note that such a notion about
morality may also be applied to religion. With all these in mind, I hope the
readers may approach different cultures with broad-mindedness, leading to a
better understanding of each other. After all, even this particular
interpretation of morality is the product of necessity and experience and
thus not necessarily The Truth (whatever that may be).
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
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.
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.
A country in which flowers.....absolutely necessary for the refinement of the heart.....are priced so as to make them a luxury, is a country which has yet to learn the first principles of civilization.
I cannot give to the barbarous comfort and encumbered ostentation of European life, the name of civilisation. Men who are not free in their souls and nobly rhythmical in their appointments, are not civilised. Sri Aurobindo.
We need each other, forever and always, because we are each other.
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