A Quote by Ovid
Birth and ancestry, and that which we have not ourselves achieved, we can scarcely call our own.
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Pedigree and ancestry and what we ourselves have not achieved, I scarcely recognize as our own.
There is provided an escape from the narrowness and poverty of the individual life, and the possibility of a life which is other and larger than our own, yet which is most truly our own. For, to be ourselves, we must be more than ourselves. What we call love is, in truth . . . the losing of our individual selves to gain a larger self.
We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia... Going further back, we share a common ancestry with our fellow primates; and going still further back, we share a common ancestry with all other living creatures and plants down to the simplest microbe. The further back we go, the greater the difference from external appearances and behavior patterns which we observe today.
When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other's feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves.
While we appreciate our ancestry as Americans or even our ethnic ancestry and our color of skin, we believe that our real citizenship is in Heaven.
We are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later; and the birth and growth of the spirit, in those who are attentive to their own inner life, are slow and exceedingly painful. Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth.
In order to find God in ourselves, we must stop looking at ourselves, stop checking and verifying ourselves in the mirror of our own futility, and be content to be in Him and to do whatever He wills, according to our limitations, judging our acts not in the light of our own illusions, but in the light of His reality which is all around us in the things and people we live with.
We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.
[Louis Brandeis] insisted on the necessity of public reason, which he thought could only be achieved if all of us just take the time to inform ourselves about the best arguments on all sides of questions so that we can make up our own minds.
Just as we descend into our consciences to judge of actions which our minds can not weigh, can we not also search in ourselves for the feeling which gives birth to forms of thought, always vague and cloudy?
We've lived through a time in which people have felt they could forge their own future and make a better world. We may not have achieved our dreams in the time frame that we once believed was realistic, but the magnitude of what is yet to be achieved only confirms the importance of our commitment. Knowing this, we can't stop now.
The fact, however, to which I want to call attention is that the master of Judo never relies upon his own strength. He scarcely uses his own strength in the greatest emergency. Then what does he use? Simply the strength of his antagonist. The force of the enemy is the only means by which that enemy is overcome.
Leaving home in a sense involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves.
If we could see ourselves... as we really are, we should see ourselves in a world of spiritual natures, our community which neither began at birth nor will end with the death of the body.
My mission is to tell the story of the birth of ourselves as a universal humanity, awakening all of us to our unique opportunity to participate through our own conscious evolution.
If we remind ourselves of the fact that every fifth American today rightly points and perhaps also with a certain degree of pride to his German ancestry or her German ancestry, we can safely say that we, indeed, share common roots.
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