On Love
When we love someone sincerely, we want his happiness and security; we
want to advance the destiny of that other person. In terms of beauty or art
or music, when these things become tremendously important to us, we want to
perfect them. So the person who loves the world, loves life, loves man, and
loves God, wishes to enrich living. He finds his joy not in what comes to
him, but in what he is able to bestow upon others. He is therefore saved from
one of the greatest causes of suffering today, and that is self-centeredness.
Where love is, self-centeredness cannot be; and where self-centeredness is,
love cannot be, regardless of the protestations that may be made. And one of
the great proofs of love is that we think not about our own good, but about
the good of others; that we are more interested in making others happy than we
are in being successful ourselves.
From Manly P. Hall, Lecture 108 - "As a Man Thinketh in His Heart" (1968), page 4
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On Beauty
In other parts of the world we find other phases of moral beauty. There is something
transcendently sensitive about the moral beauty of Krishna, the wonderful
Indian personification of the love of God. Krishna represents the more sensitive,
aesthetic qualities of beauty: beauty as the song, the dance; beauty as a tremendous
graciousness of spirit; beauty breaking forth in love and romance, enchantment
and magic; beauty as a garden; beauty as a sunset or as a white marble palace
set amidst flowers and ponds filled with beautiful fishes. In the Krishna concept
we have a child-beauty, a tremendous regeneration of all things. We have the
laughter of the gods. We have the sunshine of moral beauty as the basis of pure
joy, wonder, adventure, and the going forth each day into newness, something that is
perhaps quite far from our daily experience.
From Manly P. Hall, Lecture 128 - "Moral Beauty Is the Basis of Civilization" - Alexis Carrel (1968), page 7
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