Practise Makes A Man Perfect Quotes

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Any interest in Yoga, in miracles or psychic powers, not based on that humbleness of the soul which is the beginning and the end of all true spiritual light and love is at its best something of scientific interest, and at its worst it is that pride and desire for power which are the surest signs of spiritual darkness. Let us take an interesting psychological experiment: thought-transmission or thought-reading [.......] The person in deep sleep reads accurately what is written, and when the same experiment is repeated with success several times with different words and numbers not the slightest doubt is left in the mind of the operator that thought-transmission, or thought-reading, is a fact. And when he hears long arguments to the contrary by those who of course have not practised the experiment he cannot but smile. Well, what does the experiment prove? Only that, to quote Hamlet again, There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. But supposing that after this experiment we could attain all the psychic powers promised in Yoga, does this mean that we have advanced a single step on the spiritual path? Of course not. We have learnt something of amazing psychological interest; but we have not advanced on the path of love. We may even have gone backwards if the slightest pride or self-satisfaction has infected our mind. Those who rely on physical miracles to prove the truth of spiritual things forget the ever-present miracle of the universe and of our own lives. The lover of the physical miracle is in fact a materialist: instead of making material things spiritual, as the poet or the spiritual man does, he simply makes spiritual things material, and this is the source of all idolatry and superstition. Leaving aside the question that matter and spirit may simply be 'different modes, or degrees in perfection, of a common substractum ', as Coleridge says, and the Upanishads suggest, there is the far greater question that in everything spiritual there is an element of beauty which is truth, and which we find in faith, but which is lacking in fanaticism and superstition.
Juan Mascaró (The Upanishads)
We here meet a completely new conception of art; it is no longer a means towards an end, but an end in itself. At its origin, every form of spiritual endeavour is entirely determined by the useful purpose it serves, but such forms have the power and tendency to break free from their original purpose and make themselves independent; they become purposeless and to some extent autonomous. As soon as man feels secure and free from the immediate pressure of the struggle for life, he begins to play with the spiritual resources which he had originally developed as weapons and tools to aid him in his necessity. He begins enquiring into causes, seeking for explanations, researching into connections which have little or nothing to do with his struggle for life. Practical knowledge gives place to free enquiry, means for the mastery of nature become methods for discovering abstract truth. And thus art, originally a mere handmaid of magic and ritual, an instrument of propaganda and panegyric, a means to influence gods, spirits and men, becomes a pure, autonomous, ‘disinterested’ activity to some extent, practised for its own sake and for the beauty it reveals. In the same way, the commands and prohibitions, the duties and taboos, which were originally just expedients to make a common life in society possible, give rise to a doctrine of ethics that sets out to realize and perfect the moral personality. The Greeks were the first people to complete this transition from the instrumental to the ‘autonomous’ form of activity, whether in science, art or morality. Before them there was no free enquiry, no theoretical research, no rational knowledge and no art as we understand art—as an activity whose creations may always be considered and enjoyed as pure forms. This abandonment of the old view that art is only valuable and intelligible as a weapon in the struggle for life, in favour of a new attitude which treats it as mere play of line and colour, mere rhythm and harmony, mere imitation or interpretation of reality—this is the most tremendous change that has ever occurred in the whole history of art.
Arnold Hauser (The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages)