Something Beautiful

Graciousness

Graciousness is, to me, essential to the good life. Or even the endurable life. Here's a page of definitions of this life-saving, life-enhancing concept -- graciousness.

Wrestling ever anew

In recent days I have found the following quotation returning to my mind over and over again --

"I, who am truly no zaddik, no one assured in God, rather a man endangered before God, a man wrestling ever anew for God's light, ever anew engulfed in God's abysses, . . .

-- Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim

I need to remember that I too am "endangered before God, wrestling ever anew for the His Light."  It is helpful to know that someone of Buber's stature felt the same.   

Causes and effects

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.

— Herman Melville

Daily celebrations

You will probably like the Daily Celebrations site.  I like especially to find my way around by using this directory.

Reminders

I don't entirely agree with this statement, but it is nonetheless a good reminder --

To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life. -- T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

And then there is this --

One ought everyday to hear a song, read a fine poem, and, if possible, speak a few reasonable words. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

Finally, I am chuffed to learn that Goethe and I agree in the following --

In all things it is better to hope than to despair.

On happiness (by Aristotle & Kingwell)

Mark Kingwell, a Canadian professor, wrote the following a few years ago --

I once wrote a book about happiness. . . .  [A]t the end of the day, I kept coming back to old, old insights about happiness and world affairs, ones missed by too many psych studies and the people they poll.

Happiness, said Aristotle, is not a feeling or an experience, it is an ethical state of being. It means judging that you have made the right choices and done the right things, and enjoyed a measure of luck along the way. Where and when you are born, how the play of daily contingency affects you, do not determine your happiness, but they do constrain it. And so it often seems as though the choices of everyday life, cosmically small though they are, matter far more than events in distant capitals and war zones.   

But here is the key point. You must live your entire life with honour and commitment. You must try to build something larger than yourself: a community of citizens, a community of reason, a just and peaceful world. You may be defeated, because violence, arrogance and unreason are powerful forces in history. But that does not diminish your responsibility.

(Note: The above paragraphs came from a column by Professor Kingwell in the National Post, a Canadian newspaper.   The original column is, alas, no longer available at the NP's website.   The book to which Kingwell refers is apparently In Pursuit of Happiness, now out of print, but still availabe at Amazon.com and, I trust, elsewhere on the Web.)

Happiness

This quotation has helped me in recent days --

Happiness consists in activity.  Such is the constitution of our nature.  It is a running stream, and not a stagnant pool.  -- John Mason Good (1764-1827), English physician

The important words here, for me, were "Such is the constitution of our nature."  Those words somehow helped me get going again.   

A new day

I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning. -- J. B. Priestly

Healing through goodness

Some patients, though conscious that their condition is perilous, recover their health simply through their contentment with the goodness of the physician. --     Hippocrates (460-400 B.C.)

Obscure heroes

"For man’s greatest actions are performed in minor struggles. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment and poverty are battlefields which have their heroes - obscure heroes who are at times greater than illustrious heroes." - Victor Hugo