The California Birthday Book: Prose and Poetical Selections from the Writings of Living California Authors with a Brief Biographical Sketch of each
General
The California Birthday Book: Prose and Poetical Selections from the Writings of Living California Authors with a Brief Biographical Sketch of each
American literature -- California; Birthday books; California -- Description and travel; California -- Poetry
All things are but material reflections of mental images. This is
realized in picture and statue in temple and machine. The picture is
but a faint representation of the picture in the soul of painter. He
did his best to catch it with brush and canvas. Had it not existed for
him before the brush was in his hand, it would never have been
painted. * * * Concentration is the only mental attitude under which
mental images (ideals) shape themselves into the material life. As
long as you hold an ideal before you that long is it shaping itself
into your body, your business and into your social life. When you
change your ideal then the new begins to shape itself. Have you, like
the sculptor, held to one till it carves itself "into the marble
real?" Or have you taken the life-block and placed it into the hands
of an Ideal today, another tomorrow, and another next day, till you
have as many ideals as you have days? * * * Is not your life a
composite of all these, not one complete? Concentration means holding
to one ideal until your objective life becomes that mental picture.
Thus it is true: I am that which I think myself to be.
HENRY HARRISON BROWN,
in _Concentration: The Road to Success._
NOVEMBER 21.
The process which we call evolution is the return of the atom to God,
or the extension of consciousness in the growing creation, and this
process which unifies all that exists or can exist in our world is the
working out of the One Purpose and Plan by the One Power. This is what
we mean by the Spiritual Constitution of the Universe, and in the
light of this thought every person, animal, plant and mineral, every
atom and all force, all events and circumstances and conditions and
objects are more or less intelligent and conscious expressions of the
One Purpose and the One Life. Man is thus led to count nothing human
foreign to him, and his inner eyes open to perceive Truth, Goodness
and Beauty everywhere.
BENJAMIN FAY MILLS,
in _The New Revelation._
NOVEMBER 22.
Laughter is the music of the soul. It is the sun falling on the rain
drops. Laughter is the nightingale's voice in the night. It chases
away care, destroys worry. It is the intoxicating cup of good nature,
which cheers, but does not cheat. Laughter paints pictures, dreams
dreams, and floods life with love. Blessed are the people who can
laugh! Laughter is religion and hope; and the apostles of good nature,
who see the bright side of life, the queer and funny things among men,
the clowns in Vanity Fair, as well as the deep and terrible pathos of
life, are missionaries of comfort and evangels of good health.
REV. WILLIAM RADER,
in _Lecture on Uncle Sam; or The Reign of the Common People._
NOVEMBER 23.
Given so unique a climate as ours of Southern California, one would
expect it to be hailed gladly as a helper in the solution of this
problem of how and where to build and how to adorn one's home. For it
really meets the most trying items of the problem, making it a pure
pleasure.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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