John Armstrong Quotes

Sincerity is only as good as what we are sincere about.

You can't help people that don't want to be helped.

We need to be free if we are to love.

This is the most effective way: let the growing soul look at life with the question: 'What have you truly loved? What has drawn you upward, mastered and blessed you?

How happy he whose toil Has o'er his languid pow'rless limbs diffus'd A pleasing lassitude; he not in vain Invokes the gentle Deity of dreams. His pow'rs the most voluptuously dissolve In soft repose; on him the balmy dews Of Sleep with double nutriment descend.

This is the internal tragedy of love. If love is successful, if our love is returned and develops into a relationship, the person we are with must turn out to be other than we imagined them to be. Love craves closeness, and closeness always brings us face to face with something other than we expected.

Compatibility, on this view, is an achievement of love, not a precondition for love.

When we try to love we are not actually trying to undertake a single endeavor; rather, we are trying to do a whole range of different, and sometimes not very compatible, things simultaneously.

Time shakes the stable tyranny of thrones, And tottering empires rush by their own weight.

What Nature bids is good, is wise, and faultless we obey.

There are, while human miseries abound, A thousand ways to waste superfluous wealth, Without one fool or flatterer at your board, Without one hour of sickness or disgust.

We know great Nature's pow'r, Mother of things, whose vast unbounded sway From the deep centre all around extends Wide to the flaming barriers of the world. We feel her power; we strive not to repress (Vainly repress'd, or to deformity) Her lawful growth: ours be the task alone To check her rude excrescencies, to prune Her wanton overgrowth, and where she strays In uncouth shapes, to lead her gently back, With prudent hand, to form and better use.

It is not suffering as such that makes someone appreciate love, it is only when suffering pierces our vanity - which happens when we do not blame someone else for our pain - that it awakens a deeper respect for love.

There is, they say, (and I believe there is),
A spark within us of th' immortal fire,
That animates and moulds the grosser frame;
And when the body sinks, escapes to heaven;
Its native seat, and mixes with the gods.

Impious! forbear thus the first general hail. To disappoint, Increase and multiply, To shed thy blossoms thro' the desert air, And sow thy perish'd offspring in the winds.

This restless world
Is full of chances, which by habit's power
To learn to bear is easier than to shun.

But mostly what we think of as the 'meaning' of life concerns the style of the private autobiography we each write and which records how we 'see' ourselves. Whether this autobiography reads as a narrative of progress in which difficulties are transcended, or is chaotic, is the test of whether one's life seems to be meaningful or not. Meaning is something we find, or fail to find, as we follow through this project. We can see how love figures here: love is a major theme, but how we see our experience of love depends upon our general thinking. If, for example, we work with extremely high expectations of love we impose a tragic style upon our self-perceptions: for our experience of love will always be seen under an aspect of failure - failure focused upon ourselves or others. Hence the more subtle our thinking about love, the more intelligently we discriminate ideals from reality, the more interesting our autobiography becomes.

When the tribal groups of december trade
Seated in the figure of crocodile
And songs are sung and deals discussed, are made
Real. All ... For more than one reason they smile.
These codes are writ in secret, feeling fine
To keep what's private to my self since we
All must face our maker in our own ryhme
And reasons for being ( from regrets) free
So let the memory of your glory
Be the tenderness heartfelt love starkly
In the sky of my mind vast and pretty
Evermore glittering simplicity
Where in the truth of country grows sober
And sunshines through fog to radiate wonder

Tis not for mortals always to be blest.

One's relationship with money is lifelong, it colors one's sense of identity, it shapes one's attitude to other people, it connects and splits generations; money is the arena in which greed and generosity are played out, in which wisdom is exercised and folly committed. Freedom, desire, power, status, work, possession: these huge ideas that rule life are enacted, almost always, in and around money.

Good native Taste, tho' rude, is seldom wrong,
Be it in music, painting, or in song:
But this, as well as other faculties,
Improves with age and ripens by degrees.

Much had he read, Much more had he seen; he studied from the life, And in th' original perus'd mankind.

You don't ask a juggler which ball is highest in priority. Success is to do it all.

Know, then, whatever cheerful and serene supports the mind supports the body too.

Music exalts each joy, allays each grief, expels diseases, softens every pain.

Love can sometimes rise up like a desperate cry from a neglected part of oneself which takes a long view but which is submerged by the presence of strident wants.

Imagination need not stand as an obstacle to clear-sighted perception; on the contrary, it can be a prerequisite for recognition of the less obvious aspects of what is really there.

Ye generous maids, revenge your sex's wrong; Let not the mean destroyer e'er approach Your sacred charms. Now muster all your pride, Contempt and scorn, that, shot from Beauty's eye, Confounds the mighty impudent, and smites The front unknown to shame.

Then love of pleasure sways each heart, and we From that no more than from ourselves can fly. Blameless when govern'd well. But where it errs Extravagant, and wildly leads to ill, Public or private, there its curbing pow'r Cool reason must exert.

Sometimes pantheists will use the term "pandeism" to underscore that they share with the deists the idea that God is not a personal God who desires to be worshipped.

Imagination paints a charming view of the future, conveniently adapted to the demands of our current emotion.

Ye youths and virgins, when your generous blood Has drunk the warmth of fifteen summers, now The loves invite; now to new rapture wakes The finish'd sense: while stung with keen desire The madd'ning boy his bashful fetters bursts; And, urg'd with secret flames, the riper maid, Conscious and shy, betrays her smarting breast.

For pale and trembling anger rushes in
With faltering speech, and eyes that wildly stare,
Fierce as the tiger, madder than the seas,
Desperate and armed with more than human strength.

Money can purchase the symbols but not the causes of serenity and buoyancy. In a straightforward way we must agree that money cannot buy happiness.

How sickly grow, How pale, the plants in those ill-fated vales That, circled round with the gigantic heap Of mountains, never felt, nor ever hope To feel, the genial vigor of the sun!

The most beautiful form of compromise is forgiveness.

Toil, and be strong; by toil the flaccid nerves
Grow firm, and gain a more compacted tone:
The greener juices are by toil subdued,
Mellow'd, and subtilis'd; the vapid old
Expell'd, and all the rancor of the blood.

People are more slothful than timid. Their greatest fear is the heavy burden that uncompromising honesty and nakedness of speech and action would lay on them.