Truly, it is a blessing and not a blasphemy when I teach that "above all things there stands the heaven of chance, the heaven of innocence, the heaven of accident, the heaven of wantonness".
The thing to do, it seems to me, is to prepare yourself so you can be a rainbow in somebody else's cloud. Somebody who may not look like you. May not call God the same name you call God - if they call God at all. I may not dance your dances or speak your language. But be a blessing to somebody. That's what I think.
I am living here and now. The blessing of my life is that I am totally concentrating on the present moment. And I want to be because there is nothing but the present moment.
There are two ways of getting out of a trial. One is simply to try to get rid of the trial, and be thankful when it is over. The other is to recognize the trial as a challenge from God to claim a larger blessing than we have ever had, and to hail it with delight as an opportunity of obtaining a larger measure of divine grace.
Once in a while it vanishes - in the sense that I become deaf to beauty for a week or two or three. This coming and going of the inner life - because this is what it is - is a curse and a blessing. I don't need to explain why it's a curse. A blessing because it brings about a movement, an energy which, when it peaks, creates a poem. Or a moment of happiness.
It is best, it seems to me, to separate one's inner striving from one's trade as far as possible. It is not good when one's daily break is tied to God's special blessing.
Health is a great blessing--competence obtained by honorable industry is a great blessing--and a great blessing it is to have kind, faithful, and loving friends and relatives; but, that the greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of all privileges, is to be indeed a Christian.
For the rest of his life, Oliver Twist remembers a single word of blessing spoken to him by another child because this word stood out so strikingly from the consistent discouragement around him.
Madness, provided it comes as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings... the men of old who gave things their names saw no disgrace or reproach in madness; otherwise they would not have connected it with the name of the noblest of arts, the art of discerning the future, and called it the manic art... So, according to the evidence provided by our ancestors, madness is a nobler thing than sober sense... madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human.
Work is a blessing when it helps us to think about what were doing;but it become a curse when its sole use is to stop us thinking about the meaning of our life.
A knowledge that another has felt as we have felt, and seen things not much otherwise than we have seen them, will continue to the end to be one of life's choicest blessings.