51
All life that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands: seeking for that bird and hearing him.
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52
By this practice he may obtain the solitude of adversity without its melancholy, its instructions without its censures, and its sensibility without its perturbations.
53
Watch a man do his most common actions; those are indeed the things which will tell you the real character of a great man.
54
Very, very early in my boyhood I had acquired the habit of going about alone to amuse myself in my own way.
55
Desire is possibility seeking expression, or function seeking performance.
56
Every thought we think makes it necessary for us to think another thought; consciousness is continually expanding.
57
Extreme altruism is no better and no nobler than extreme selfishness; both are mistakes.
58
Sensation is unorganized stimulus, perception is organized sensation, conception is organized perception, science is organized knowledge, wisdom is organized life: each is a greater degree of order, and sequence, and unity.
59
Intimate friends are not fair witnesses to character, any more than professed enemies.
60
This danger is greatly heightened, as it has been always observable that men are less jealous of encroachments of one department upon another than upon their own reserved rights.
61
The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing: it refuses nothing. It receives, but does not keep.
62
Counsel in the heart of man is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out.
63
it is nevertheless often true that one man's vulgarity is another's lyric
64
A man who is morose or violent to his equals, is sure to be one who has lived among inferiors, whom he could frighten or worry into submission.
65
A provision of endless apparatus, a bustle of infinite inquiry and research, or even the mere mechanical labour of copying, may be employed, to evade and shuffle off real labour—the real labour of thinking.
Joshua Reynoldsverified·Discourse XII, in Fifteen Discourses Delivered in the Royal Academy·December 10, 1784
66
Acquire a method of perceiving how all things change into one another.
67
Character, says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms, character is destiny. But not the whole of our destiny.
Wrongly attributed
Character is destiny is routinely credited to Heraclitus, on the strength of a fragment usually given as a man's character is his fate. That translation is itself contested, and the English aphorism does not come from it: it comes from Novalis, and reached English readers through George Eliot, who quotes him here in 1860 and immediately qualifies it. The half everyone drops is the half Eliot wrote.