"Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. Humanity only begins for man with self-surrender."
Amiel's Journal.
"What are the chief causes of Unrest? If you know yourself, you will answer Pride, Selfishness, Ambition. As you look back upon the past years of your life, is it not true that its unhappiness has chiefly come from the succession of personal mortifications and almost trivial disappointments which the intercourse of life has brought you? Great trials come at lengthened intervals, and we rise to breast them; but it is the petty friction of our everyday life with one another, the jar of business or of work, the discord of the domestic circle, the collapse of our ambition, the crossing of our will, the taking down of our conceit, which make inward peace impossible. Wounded vanity, then, disappointed hopes, unsatisfied selfishness—these are the old, vulgar, universal sources of man's unrest."
Pax Vobiscum, Henry Drummond.
NOVEMBER 10
"Now, what is the first step towards the winning of that rest? It is the giving up of self-will and the receiving of God's will as our own—and what that means is clear. It is to make our life at one with God's character, with justice and purity, with truth and love, with mercy and joy. It is the surrender of our own pleasure and the making of God's desire for us the master of our life. That is the first step—a direction of the soul to God. The second has to do with mankind. It is the replacing of all self-love by the love of our fellow-men; a direction of the soul to God through man.
"These two ways are in reality one; and there is no other way, if we search the whole world over, in which we may attain rest. Simple as it sounds, it is the very last way many of us seek. We fight against this truth, and it has to be beaten into us by pain. Clear as it seems, it is a secret which is as difficult to discover as the Elixir of Life, but it is so difficult because we do not will to discover it."
The Gospel of Joy, Stopford Brooke.