Why Try?

     Yes, I had supped alone, feasting on divine verities that can never die. Would not my own soul grow lean and small if I disdained those who were hungry for what I had taken freely out of the seemingly impenetrable silence of the sky?
     Could one rest with the mere recovery of these truths for oneself? There are other people in this populous world, and among them a few who might welcome such thoughts as I could give them.
     The world of fact has little sympathy with the man who stands aloof and keeps his soul free for visions in which it does not share. And the world is right. We who are seers and mystics have to draw the last crystal drop of water from out the well of vision, but with that begins our duty, stern and strict, of offering the unfamiliar drink to the first wayfarer thirsty enough to accept it. Not for ourselves alone, but for all alike does Neptune cast his magic trident over the deep places of the soul and show us his glamorous pictures therein.
     If the privilege of sitting at the feet of forgotten but none the less potent gods is indeed high, then the travail of carrying their message to an unheeding yet suffering people is just as high, just as noble. Perhaps no man's mind is so clothed in ugliness that a few faint gleams of hidden beauty do not trouble him now and again and cause him to raise his head a little towards the stars, sometimes in wonder at the ceaseless harmony of the spheres....
— Paul Brunton, from "With a Wise Man from the East," in The Secret Path, pp. 22-23.

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
— Marcel Proust, in Life 101: Everything We Wished We had Learned About Life in School — But Didn't, John-Roger & Peter McWilliams, p. 6.

     As John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out, "Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof."
     Firmness of mind, to a point, is a good thing. It keeps us from being wishy-washy, swayed by every new bit of information that comes our way. Carried beyond a certain point, however, the mind becomes closed to any new information from any source.
— John-Rogers & Peter McWilliams, Ibid., p. 31.

First he conceived from the depth of his being a something, neither mind nor matter, but rich in potentiality. . . . It was a medium in which the one and the many demanded to be most subtly dependent upon one another; in which all parts and all characters must pervade and be pervaded by all other parts and all other characters; in which each thing must seemingly be but an influence in all other things; and yet the whole must be no other than the sum of all its parts, and each part an all-pervading determination of the whole. It was a cosmical substance in which any individual spirit must be, mysteriously, at once an absolute self and a mere fragment of the whole.
— Olaf Stapleton, Star Maker, quoted in Synchronicity: Science, Myth, and the Trickster, Allan Combs & Mark Holland, p. 10.

When I consider the short extent of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the small space that I fill or even see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces unknown to me and which know me not, I am terrified and astounded to find myself here and there. For there is no reason why it should be here, not there, why now rather than at another time.
— Blaise Pascal.