Some Sayings by Great Masters

 ... it's so much pleasanter and wholesomer to be warmed by the sun while you can be, than by an artificial fire. I thus warmed myself by the still glowing embers which the summer, like a departed hunter, had left.

___ Thoreau

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Truth is the mind and beauty is the heart of the ultimate reality, if at all we can have some terminology to comprehend it with our limited senses. And art straddles the tenuous bridge holding truth and beauty together, binding each to the other with almost a synonymous bond. Economics will hardly have any valuation for truth, beauty and art. The beholders of truth, lovers of beauty and practitioners of art may try to monetize their domains, but they mostly fail. Truth, beauty and art stand, somehow, in the bylanes, in almost secluded corners, away from the mainstream commerce and monetization. (It's my own but I am just a particle of dust around the feet of these masters and have just pasted my own poor stuff on the great wall out of some idiosyncrasy).

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...why should not a poet's cat be winged as well as his horse?

___ Thoreau

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Great masters like Charles Dickens tell ageless truths. Not only that, they voice little individual truths as well which find perfect echo in many hearts even after almost 200 years, like the following passage does with me. Coolly bachelor Mr. George goes musing over his status in Bleak House:

"A family home," he ruminates, as he marches along, "however small it is, makes a man like me look lonely. But it's well I never made that evolution of matrimony. I shouldn't have been fit for it. I am such a vagabond still, even at my present time of life, that I couldn't hold to the gallery a month together, if it was a regular pursuit, or if I didn't camp there gypsy fashion. Come! I disgrace nobody and cumber nobody; that's something. I have not done that for many a long year!"

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For, howsoever bad the devil can be in fustian or smock-frock (and he can be very bad in both), he is a more designing, callous, and intolerable devil when he sticks a pin in his shirt-front, calls himself a gentleman, backs a card or colour, plays a game or so of billiards, and knows a little about bills and promissory notes, than in any other form he wears.

___ Charles Dickens

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All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms; all purity is one. It is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually. They are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist he is. The impure can neither stand nor sit with purity. When the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another. If you would be chaste, you must be temperate. What is chastity? How shall a man know if he is chaste? He shall not know it. We have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is. We speak conformably to the rumor which we have heard. From exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality.

___ Thoreau

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Yet the spirit can for the time pervade and control every member and function of the body, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion. The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it. Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open. By turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down. He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established.

___ Thoreau

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We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies. Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its nature. I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own; that we may be well, yet not pure. 

__ Thoreau

If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal—that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.

__ Thoreau

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If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes, or even insanity, it may lead him; and yet that way, as he grows more resolute and faithful, his road lies.

__ Thoreau

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I prefer the natural sky to an opium-eater's heaven.

__ Thoreau

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... he will be regarded as a benefactor of his race who shall teach man to confine himself to a more innocent and wholesome diet. I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

__ Thoreau

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I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind.

__ Thoreau

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Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth.

___ Thoreau

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...days when idleness was the most attractive and productive industry. Many a forenoon I have stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly; nor do I regret that I didn't waste more of them in the workshop or the teacher's desk.

__ Thoreau

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How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down?

__ Thoreau

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A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows.

___ Thoreau

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