Johann Kaspar Lavater Quotes

Great souls are harmonious.

Virtue is harmony.

It has amazed me that the most incongruous traits should exist in the same person and, for all that, yield a plausible harmony.

Know the white, But keep the black, Be an example to the world! Being an example to the world, Ever true and unwavering, Return to the infinite.

The Tao can't be perceived. Smaller than an electron, it contains uncountable galaxies. If powerful men and women could remain centered in the Tao, all things would be in harmony. The world would become a paradise. All people would be at peace, and the law would be written in their hearts. When you have names and forms, know that they are provisional. When you have institutions, know where their functions should end. Knowing when to stop, you can avoid any danger. All things end in the Tao as rivers flow into the sea.

God is Unity, but always works in variety.

The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. Better to live a life of single-pointed focus, he taught. But what about the benefits of living harmoniously among extremes? What if you could somehow create an expansive enough life that you could synchronize seemingly incongruous opposites into a worldview that excludes nothing?

This principle of opposites is at the very root of Creation, which is divided between the rule of the King and the Queen; Night and Day; the One and the Varied; the Eternal and the Evolving.

The way of Heaven and Earth may be completely declared in one sentence: They are without any doubleness, and so they produce things in a manner that is unfathomable.

I like a thing simple but it must be simple through complication. Everything must come into your scheme, otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity.

My lifelong ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form.

There is a need for expertise, for real expertise. I'm not doing much to help that cause, but I think we can find the healthy balance between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. Jocks and nerds may come together, I believe it.

Unity, to be real, must stand the severest strain without breaking.

All things, and man as well, should be like nature, without measure.

Great as heaven and earth are, men still find some things in them with which to be dissatisfied. Thus it is that, were the superior man to speak of his way in all its greatness, nothing in the world would be found able to embrace it, and were he to speak of it in its minuteness, nothing in the world would be found able to split it.

Only the intelligent knows how to identify all things as one. . . . When one is at ease with himself, one is near Tao. This is to let Nature take its own course.

His life was gentle; and the elements So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up And say to all the world, THIS WAS A MAN!

Nature and wisdom always say the same.

As unity demanded for its expression what at first might have seemed its opposite--variety; so repose demands for its expression the implied capability of its opposite--energy. It is the most unfailing test of beauty; nothing can be ignoble that possesses it, nothing right that has it not.

There are no invisible seams.

Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy

I must achieve internal consistency.

Live simply and virtuously, true to your nature, drawing no line between what is spiritual and what is not.

We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.

Child and serpent, star and stone — all one.