To arrive at the self-awareness of one’s immateriality is the highest task.
Certain propositions arranged sequentially are not meant as demonstrative arguments in themselves but rather as light to guide one towards those arguments.
Gradations of insight are apparent — the rate at which one can grasp the middle term signifies the prior.
Let the Lord dignify the sullen.
Honor is the necessity that remains when all the accretions of society have worn away from man.
Surely, the mother with a dead young child looks at the walls in some disbelief that such a thing ever did happen in her life — the feeling of strangeness of its very possibility would be enough to make defining strangeness in itself possible.
The particular analogy one draws from something to another indicates something about the psyche.
Even in the worst of human invention one can create space for the blooming of something reparative; it is merely a matter of conditions.
The ancients were right to identify one’s moral habituation as being the performance of certain actions without the need for prior deliberation; it is clear that if one must persist long in adjudication between good and evil on a certain point then one is either not properly habituated to good, or the problem in question is more complex, in an intellectual sense, than what their moral temperament is used to — although at times, one must disagree with the ancient precept of aiming for the mean, for in times of great peril, excesses are, in fact, a moral imperative, and only in doing so does man transcend the flesh, the final task.
One must not mistake religious asceticism for necessary reflection of the One; asceticism may only stay at the level of petty mental transactions.
Some change is gradual, but the most decisive is often punctuated.
The reason why grief requires more expression than joy is the former’s lack of recognition and privation of joy itself, while joy, inasmuch as it is perceived as the dominant emotion, does not necessarily require anything surplus to itself.
One of the masters in the depths of his hubris was pulled up by the Lord, whereupon the master mentioned:
Hence, he buried himself in order that he may see the sky plain again.
Has the Lord not lit the narrow darkened alley one step at a time, one lantern after another, despite the vast chasm between them? Is the flickering dim light not enough of a vinculum to pull one forward?
If one believes one has a speck of arrogance in his soul, he is thoroughly mistaken; although it is possible for the Lord to remove all stains of arrogance from one’s soul, and it is indeed the belief of this miserable wretch in the veracity of this possibility, it seems more just and worthy of the Lord’s stature that He purify one of all arrogance and yet prevent the knowledge of that purification from becoming instantiated in the perception of the subject.
Knowledge is not belief.
One who desires to die before death but takes no actions towards such an aim forces the hand of the heavens.
Relief is contingent on distress; without the actualization of distress, not as a possibility but as a reality, relief cannot be actualized either.
The late-summer trees have always been tolerably nice.