Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl tells us that humor kept the Holocaust prisoners alive when no other means of encouragement proved even slightly successful. Laughter once a day achieves miraculous effects on the nervous system and the brain, especially in times of war and destruction. In essence, laughter relaxes the body and the mind, a process which allows the brain to re-focus.
1. As my body continues on its journey, my thoughts keep turning back and bury themselves in days past.-- Gustave Flaubert--to his mother, 23 November 1849
1B. The answers to our human question lies in the divine. As H. P. Blavatsky says in Isis Unveiled, "Call the phenomenon force, energy, electricity or magnetism, will or spirit-power, it will ever be the partial manifestation of the soul, whether disembodied or imprisoned for while in its body--of a portion of that intelligent, omnipotent, and individual WILL, pervading all nature, and known, through the insufficiency of human language to express correctly psychological images, as --GOD" (Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, p.41).
1C) "There are plenty of fearless people in the world, but luck is even better than courage . . . Surer than wisdom and stronger than justice. Luck is a great thing. It is the only thing worth having on one's side" (Joseph Conrad's Suspense, p. 4).
1D) "It's not the most powerful rulers who have the happiest populations." -- Graham Greene's The Quiet American, p. 56.
2) "Power," the Greek proverb says, "will show what a man is."
3) Four things that are never satisfied: Hades, a barren woman, the Earth longing for rain, and fire" -- Proverbs 30
4) "Must man, the heaven climber, be ever the victim of the crawling reptiles of his species!" -- Mary Shelley
5) "The purpose of the Apocalyptic Works: To reconcile the suffering of the righteous with the demands of a religious conscience"--Dummelow
6) "The work that our life accomplishes, the whole of this work, the meaning of it is not, nor can be intelligible to me. . . Why am I living? . . . Why that war? Why my subsequent lawless life? To understand it, to understand the whole of the Master's Will is not in my power. But to do His will, that is written down in my conscience, is in my power; that I know for certain. And when I am fulfilling it, I have sureness and peace." --Tolstoy's Resurrection
7) Dripping hollows out rock.--Ovid
8) The safety of the people is the supreme law.--Cicero
9) A thing well begun is half done. --Cervantes( Don Quixote. New York: Penguin Books, 1987)
10) Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.--Voltaire
11) "Experience is the mother of all sciences" (Cervantes 160).
12) "Diligence is the mother of good fortune" (Cervantes 413).
13) Honors change manners.--Cervantes
14) Try that bone on another dog.--Cervantes
15) "To none will we sell, to none will we deny, to none will we delay right or justice"-- Magna Carta
16) Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another--Euclid
17) I will analyze the actions and appetites of men as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids." --Spinoza
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Quest of the Spirit: From Suffering to Acceptance
Non-FictionGod's spirit works in the lives of men during times of separation, suffering, conflict, and despair to provide solace, self-awareness, and hope. Through Quest of the Spirit, one observes how notable writers learned the truth about themselves and...
