Quotes by Ray Stannard Baker

Most of us have collections of sayings we live by. . . . Whenever words fly up at me from the printed page as I read, I intercept them instantly, knowing they are for me. I turn them over carefully in my mind and cling to them hard.

Did you think you could have the good without the evil? Did you think you could have the joy without the sorrow? . . . . I have been thinking much about pain. How could I help it? . . . . Sooner or later, regardless of the wit of man, we have pain to face; a reality; a final inescapable, immutable fact of life. What poor souls, if we have then no philosophy to face it with! This pain will not last; it never has lasted. I'll think about what I am going to write tomorrow-not about me, not about my body.

Nothing lasts-not even pain.

There must be a technique for meeting pain. There must be a technique of endurance based on the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity, as Marcus Aurelius taught long ago.

Suddenly it came to me, as a kind of new light, that I would no longer resist and struggle; I would accept the unavoidable. If it was in the nature of my disease, what else that was wise could I do? At first the torment, ravaging unrestrained, seemed even worse than before. It consumed me utterly. But I had a glimmering sense that I was at least playing a voluntary part in my own destiny; that, somehow, I was substituting reason for blind, involuntary, fear-driven resistance. This effort I continued through the greater part of one terrible night, failing often, unable to yield completely, driven by red-hot scourges into the old resistances. At dawn, in spite of the best medication the doctors knew, I was exhausted, but I began to feel that I was on the way toward what might be, for me, a new method. This I practiced faithfully and with increasing confidence for some time. I no longer resisted the inevitable! I am not sure that there was a great decrease in the actual physical suffering; I do know that the period of the paroxysm was reduced, since resistance seemed merely to prolong it. But the great reward was in the mind: in my own ability to command myself in the face of such a catastrophe; to preserve my equanimity; to rest securely upon reason when panic might so easily overwhelm me. I had moments in the midst of such paroxysms during the earlier nights when I was so secure in mind, so tranquil, that I felt it did not much matter what happened to my body. Nothing could touch me.