you might truthfully be able to say of yourself : “I cannot do anything else, I cannot do otherwise.”

So learn, then, from the lily and the bird, learn this, the dexterity of the unconditioned.

For to cast sorrow away, but not upon God, is “distraction.” But distraction is a dubious and ambivalent remedy for sorrow.

In nature everything is obedience, unconditional obedience.

For if you cast away all sorrow, you of course retain only whatever joy you have. Yet this will avail but little. Learn, therefore, from the lily and the bird. Cast all your sorrow upon God, entirely, unconditionally, as the lily and the bird do: then you will become unconditionally joyful like the lily and the bird.

As noted, the certainty of downfall would disturb a human being, so that although only the briefest of existences had been allotted him, he did not fulfill the possibility he had in fact been granted. “To what purpose?” he would say, or “Why?” he would say, or “What good will it do?” he would say: and then he would not develop the whole of his pote

What is joy, or what is it to be joyful? It is truly to be present to oneself; but truly to be present to oneself is this “today,” this to be today, truly to be today. And the truer it is that you are today, the more you are entirely present to yourself in being today, the less does tomorrow, the day of misfortune, exist for you. Joy is the present

Even less may you become self-important—in view of the fact that the lily and the bird, after all, are simple—so that you (perhaps in order to feel that you are a human being) become clever, and speaking with reference to some particular tomorrow, say: “The lily and the bird, of course they can—they who do not even have a tomorrow by which to be pl

You, too, are of course subject to necessity. God’s will is indeed done in any case, so strive to make a virtue of necessity by doing God’s will in unconditional obedience.