September 17 I will tell you a great lesson I have learnt in this life. It is this: The higher is your ideal, the more miserable you are; for such a thing as an ideal cannot be attained in the world, or in this life even. He who wants perfection in the world is a madman, for it cannot be…There are two sorts of persons in the world. The one -- strong - nerved, quiet, yielding to nature, not given to much imagination, yet good, kind, sweet, etc. For such is this world; they alone are born to be happy. There are others again with high - strong nerves, tremendously imaginative, with intense feeling, always going high one moment and coming down the next. For them there is no happiness. The first class will have almost an even tenor of happiness; the last will have to run between ecstasy and misery. But of these alone what we call geniuses are made. There is some truth in the recent theory that genius is a sort madness. Now, persons of this class if they want to be great, they must fight to finish -- clear out the deck for battle. No encumbrance -- no marriage, no children, no undue attachment to anything except the one idea, and live and die for that. I am a person of this sort. I have taken up the one idea of Vedanta and I have cleared the deck for action. (p.389-91, V.8, Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Swamiji’s letter to MaryHale dt 17 September 1896)
Posted on: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 03:30:01 +0000
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