Rasselas

It's been a while... just haven't had time, I suppose, but I also suppose nothing has stood out to me enough to have the urge to share it. Since I found myself twittering quotes tonight while reading The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, by Samuel Johnson, I realized it was time to revisit with a couple that caught my eye:

"'Envy is commonly reciprocal. We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it himself'" (Johnson 35).

I don't agree with the part about happiness "never to be found", but perhaps the key point is in believing it something possessed by others, to be sought out and gained when it must be found within. Cliche, fine. That's my reflection; add your own.

"'...Yet, believe me, prince, there was not one who did not dread the moment when solitude should deliver him to the tyranny of reflection'" (Johnson 35).

I was just glad to see I'm not the only one to experience such torment, so I obviously needed to share this quote, as proof! ;)

"'For the hope of happiness... is so strongly impressed, that the longest experience is not able to efface* it. Of the present state, whatever it be, we feel, and are forced to confess, the misery, yet, when the same state is again at a distance, imagination paints it as desirable'" (Johnson 45).

*Efface: obliterate, remove

A.K.A. : "The seaweed is always greener/ in somebody else's lake-" except, this one caught me off-guard because the "lake" here was once our very own habitat! It introduces the idea of perpetual cycles of returning to how you once were but still finding it unsatisfactory... to dwell on this kind of unhappiness is dreary. Which is why I think I must return again to the "cliche" that I find to hold truest wisdom: "Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

This one's just for laughs, and is, admittedly, taken (a little bit) out of context:

"Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures" (Johnson 51).

Next on the list will be the last for tonight:

"All that virtue can afford is quietness of conscience, a steady prospect of a happier state; this may enable us to endure calamity with patience; but remember that patience must suppose pain" (Johnson 53).

Ponder this while I try to go to sleep.