inspiration

Just don't give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there's love and inspiration, I don't think you can go wrong.

We wish to inspire the preference we feel; love must be mutual.

"What sort of man or woman shall I be; what kind of life shall I propose and hew out ?" The answer one frames to this question is his personal ideal, and will exercise a potent influence upon the development of his character and the direction of his conduct. Toward it the growing soul strives, day after day, year after year; its outlines, first existing only in the imagination of the heart, gradually, almost imperceptibly impress themselves on the soul and body, and manifest themselves in the outer life; "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." The personal ideal distinguishes man from lower creatures; and its perfection and power mark the high and full development of humanity. Very early it becomes the directing influence in self-culture,-which is by far the most important part of education; all truly higher education is self-education; the mission of all training from without is to stimulate and aid and guide one to take charge of his own culture and career. Conscious education is always directed by some sort of an ideal: the school, the home, national education are laboring to mold men and women into certain general forms of excellence and virtue; the personal ideal is the image that one forms of his own possible self. The personal ideal must have power over our lives, else it is not an ideal at all, but only an idea. One must not merely dream of strength, of wisdom, of skill and power, of honor and righteousness, of nobility and generosity, - he must resolve to attain them. He must see himself pursuing and achieving, and be inspired and energized by the vision. Such a vision of power is the personal ideal.

It has all the contortions of the sibyl without the inspiration.

Men and women, inspired by faith in man's dignity, goaded by conviction in man's responsibility, labored that this land might be a better home for those who followed them. Because every American generation attacked its problems with fresh vigor, we have peopled a continent, subdued its prairies and wilderness, tamed its rivers and devoted its resources to the betterment of those who dwell in it.

The pleasure of love is in loving. We are much happier in the passion we feel than in that we inspire.

We give advice, we do not inspire conduct.

We have the peculiar spectacle of a nation which, to a limited extent, practices Christianity without actively believing in Christianity. We are asked to turn to the Church for our enlightenment, but when we do this we find that the voice of the Church is not inspired. The voice of the Church today is the echo of our own voices. And the result of this experience, already manifest, is disillusionment. . . . The way out is the sound of a voice, not our voice, but the voice coming from somewhere not ourselves, in the existence of which we cannot disbelieve. It is the task of the Pastors to hear this voice, cause us to hear it, and to tell us what it says. If they cannot hear it, or if they fail to tell us what it says, we laymen are totally lost. Without it we are no more capable of saving the world than we are capable of creating it in the first place.

The only limitless thing I know of is human want. Civilization itself is nothing more than the creation of wants, followed by methods of satisfying those wants. At the moment we had better give consideration to the fact that we may not be creating enough stuff to satisfy the wants this education has inspired.

Reverence for life . . . does not allow the scholar to live for his science alone, even if he is very useful . . . the artist to exist only for his art, even if he gives inspiration to many. . . . It refuses to let the business man imagine that he fulfills all legitimate demands in the course of his business activities. It demands from all that they should sacrifice a portion of their own lives for others.