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All In Your Mind
476. Art; Contemplation; Learning
"Example is always more efficacious than precept. A soldier is
formed in war, and a painter must copy pictures. In this,
contemplative life has the advantage: great actions are seldom
seen, but the labors of art are always at hand for those who
desire to know what art has been able to perform."
Johnson: Rasselas [Imlac]
Note: If you haven't read it yet, please read this note of caution regarding quotes from
Rasselas.
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499. After-life; Contemplation;
Mortality; Pleasure
"Pleasure, in itself harmless, may become mischievous by
endearing us to a state which we know to be transient and
probatory, and withdrawing our thoughts from that of which every
hour brings us nearer to the beginning, and of which no length of
time will bring us to the end. Mortification is not virtuous in
itself, nor has any other use but that it disengages us from
allurements of sense. In the state of future perfection, to
which we all aspire, there will be pleasure without danger, and
security without restraint."
Johnson: Rasselas [Imlac]
Note: If you haven't read it yet, please read this note of caution regarding quotes from
Rasselas.
Link
515. After-Life; Contemplation; Piety;
Religion; Retreat; Temptation
...it appears, upon a philosophical estimate, that, supposing
the mind, at any certain time, in an equipoise between the
pleasures of this life and the hopes of futurity, present objects
falling more frequently into the scale would in time
preponderate, and that our regard for an invisible state would
grow every moment weaker, till at last it would lose all its
activity, and become absolutely without effect.
To prevent this dreadful event, the balance is put into our
own hands, and we have power to transfer the weight to either
side. The motives to a life of holiness are infinite, not less
than the favour or anger of Omnipotence, not less than eternity
of happiness or misery. But these can only influence our conduct
as they gain our attention, which the business or diversions of
the world are always calling off by contrary attractions.
The great art of piety, and the end for which all the arts of
religion seem to be instituted, is the perpetual renovation of
the motives to virtue, by a voluntary employment of our mind in
the contemplation of its excellence, its importance, and its
necessity, which, in proportion as they are more frequently and
more willingly resolved, gain a more forcible and permanent
influence, till in time they become the reigning ideas, the
standing principles of action, and the test by which every thing
proposed to the judgment is rejected or approved.
To facilitate this change of our affections it is necessary
that we weaken the temptations of the world, by retiring at
certain seasons from it; for its influence arising only from its
presence is much lessened when it becomes the object of solitary
meditation. A constant residence amidst noise and pleasure
inevitably obliterates the impressions of piety, and a frequent
abstraction of ourselves into a state where this life, like the
next, operates only upon the reason, will reinstate religion in
its just authority, even without those irradiations from above,
the hope of which I have no intention to withdraw from the
sincere and the diligent.
Johnson: Rambler #7 (April 10, 1750)
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589. Contemplation; Corruption
"A man cannot spend all this life in frolic: age, or disease, or
solitude, will bring some hours of serious consideration, and it
will then afford no comfort to think, that he has extended the
dominion of vice, that he has loaded himself with the crimes of
others, and can never know the extent of his own wickedness, or
make reparation for the mischief that he has caused. There is
not, perhaps, in all the stores of ideal anguish, a thought more
painful than the consciousness of having propagated corruption by
vitiating principles, of having not only drawn others from the
path of virtue, but blocked up the way by which they should
return, of having blinded them to every beauty but the paint of
pleasure, and deafened them to every call but the alluring voice
of the sirens of destruction."
Johnson: Rambler #31 (June 30, 1750)
Link
604. Contemplation; Memory
"So few of the hours of life are filled up with objects adequate
to the mind of man, and so frequently are we in want of present
pleasure or employment, that we are forced to have recourse every
moment to the past and future for supplemental satisfactions, and
relieve the vacuities of our being by recollections of former
passages, or anticipation of events to come."
Johnson: Rambler #41 (August 7, 1750)
Link
608. Contemplation; Memory
"We owe to memory not only the increase of our knowledge, and our
progress in rational inquiries, but many other intellectual
pleasures. Indeed, almost all that we can be said to enjoy is
past or future; the present is in perpetual motion, leaves us as
soon as it arrives, ceases to be present before its presence is
well perceived, and is only known to have existed by the effects
which it leaves behind. The greatest part of our ideas arises,
therefore, from the view before or behind us, and we are happy or
miserable according as we are affected by the survey of our life,
or our prospect of future existence."
Johnson: Rambler #41 (August 7, 1750)
Link
609. Contemplation; Imagination;
Futurity; Memory
"It is ... much more common for the solitary and thoughtful
to amuse themselves with schemes of the future, than reviews of
the past. For the future is pliant and ductile, and will be
easily moulded by a strong fancy into any form. But the images
which memory presents are of a stubborn and untractable nature,
the objects of remembrance have already existed, and left their
signature behind them impressed upon the mind, so as to defy all
attempts of erasure or of change.
"As the satisfactions, therefore, arising from memory are
less arbitrary, they are more solid, and are, indeed, the only
joys which we can call our own."
Johnson: Rambler #41 (August 7, 1750)
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