filamentosmovimentos

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"Discipline and routine can bring more happiness than indiscipline ... because with indiscipline we never know how successful each day may be, there is no table of defined tasks, and we have the continuous feeling of drifting, a feeling to which is added the general tendency of society to measure the happiness of each person by its degree of success ..."

"...that calm so propitious for work and for discipline of the mind seems to me one of the richest results of love. And it puzzles me that these joys of love, so precarious at best, and so rarely perfect in the course of human life, however we may have sought or received them, should be regarded with such mistrust by the so-called wise, who denounce the danger of habit and excess in sensuous delight, instead of fearing its absence or its loss"

"In alchemical treatises, the formula L'Oeuvre au Noir, designates what is said to be the most difficult phase of the alchemist's process, the separation and dissolution of substance. It is still not clear whether the term applied to daring experiments on matter itself, or whether it was understood to symbolize trials of the mind in discarding all forms of routine and prejudice. Doubtless it signified one or the other meaning alternately, or perhaps both at the same time."

first and second excerpts from "Memoirs of Hadrian" by Marguerite Yourcenar

third excerpt from "the Abyss" ("L'oeuvre au noir") by Marguerite Yourcenar

Pardon, le texte original est en Français. Est que l'Anglais peut dire ce texte?!