Karma
When I am inclined to complain about having worked so many years and taken nothing but debt, though I feel the want of money so continually (much more, doubtless, than I ought to feel it), let me remember that I come in free, gratis, to the work of hundreds and thousands of better men than myself who often were much worse paid than I have been. If a man’s true self is his karma—the life which his work lives but which he knows very little about and by which he takes nothing—let him remember at least that he can enjoy the karma of others, and this about squares the account—or rather far more than squares it. [1883.]
Birth and Death
i
They are functions one of the other and if you get rid of one you must get rid of the other also. There is birth in death and death in birth. We are always dying and being born again.
ii
Life is the gathering of waves to a head, at death they break into a million fragments each one of which, however, is absorbed at once into the sea of life and helps to form a later generation which comes rolling on till it too breaks.
iii
What happens to you when you die? But what happens to you when you are born? In the one case we are born and in the other we die, but it is not possible to get much further.