Charles Kingsley

“ What a strange mystery is that of mutual self-sacrifice! to exist for one moment for another! the perfection of human bliss! And does not love teach us two things? First, that self-sacrifice, the living for others, is the law of our perfect being, and next, that by and in self-sacrifice alone can we attain to the perfect apprehension of ourselves, our own personality, our own duty, our own bliss. So that the mystics are utterly wrong when they fancy that self-sacrifice can be attained by self-annihilation. Self-sacrifice, instead of destroying the sense of personality, perfects it. ”

“ Music soothes us, stirs us up; it puts noble feelings into us; it melts us to tears, we know not how; it is a language by itself, just as perfect, in its way, as speech, as words; just as divine, just as blessed. Music has been called the speech of angels; I will go farther, and call it the speech of God Himself.
The old Greeks, the wisest of all the heathen, made a point of teaching their children music, because, they said, it taught them not to be self-willed and fanciful, but to see the beauty of order, the usefulness of rule, the divineness of law. ”

“ A blessed thing it is for any man or woman to have a friend, one human soul whom we can trust utterly, who knows the best and worst of us, and who loves us in spite of all our faults; who will speak the honest truth to us, while the world flatters us to our face, and laughs at us behind our back; who will give us counsel and reproof in the days of prosperity and self-conceit; but who, again, will comfort and encourage us in the day of difficulty and sorrow, when the world leaves us alone to fight our battle as we can. ”

“ Science is, I verily believe, like virtue, its own exceeding great reward. I can conceive few human states more enviable than that of the man to whom—panting in the foul laboratory, or watching for his life in the tropic forest—Isis shall for a moment lift her sacred veil and show him, once and for ever, the thing he dreamed not of, some law, or even mere hint of a law, explaining one fact: but explaining with it a thousand more, connecting them all with each other and with the mighty whole, till order and meaning shoots through some old chaos of scattered observations. ”

“ I am a man, thou art a woman—not by reason of bones and muscles, nerves and brain, which I have in common with apes, and dogs, and horses—I am a man, thou art a man or woman, not because we have a flesh, God forbid! but because there is a spirit in us, a divine spark and ray which nature did not give, and which nature cannot take away. And therefore, while I live on earth, I will live to the spirit, not to the flesh, that I may be indeed a man. ”

“ Is it merely a fancy that we are losing that love for Spring which among our old forefathers rose almost to worship? That the perpetual miracle of the budding leaves and the returning song-birds awakes no longer in us the astonishment which it awoke yearly among the dwellers in the old world, when the sun was a god who was sick to death each winter, and returned in spring to life, and health, and glory; when Freya, the goddess of youth and love, went forth over the earth while the flowers broke forth under her tread over the brown moors, and the birds welcomed her with song? ”

“ Have patience, have faith, have hope, as thou standest at the foot of Christ’s Cross, and holdest fast to it, the anchor of the soul and reason, as well as of the heart. For, however ill the world may go, or seem to go, the Cross is the everlasting token that God so loved the world that He spared not His only-begotten Son, but freely gave Him for it. Whatsoever else is doubtful, that at least is sure—that good must conquer, because God is good, that evil must perish, because God hates evil, even to the death. ”

“ The earth is holy! Can there be a more glorious truth to carry out—one which will lead us more into all love and beauty and purity in heaven and earth? One which must have God’s light of love shining on it at every step. God gives us souls and bodies exquisitely attuned for this very purpose—the æsthetic faculty, our sensibilities to the beautiful. All events of life, all the workings of our hearts, should point to this one idea. As I walk the fields, the trees and flowers and birds, and the motes of rack floating in the sky, seem to cry to me: “Thou knowest us! ”

“ In his exclusive care for the body the physician witnesses unconsciously yet mightily for the soul, for God, for the Bible, for immortality. Is he not witnessing for God when he shows by his acts that he believes God to be a God of life, not of death; of health, not of disease; of order, not of disorder; of joy and strength, not of misery and weakness? Is he not witnessing for Christ when, like Christ, he heals all manner of sickness and disease among the people, and attacks physical evil as the natural foe of man and of the Creator of man? ”

“ What surely is a woman’s calling but to teach man? and to teach him what? To temper his fiercer, coarser, more self-assertive nature by the contact of her gentleness, purity, self-sacrifice. To make him see that not by blare of trumpets, not by noise, wrath, greed, ambition, intrigue, puffery, is good and lasting work to be done on earth; but by wise self-distrust, by silent labour, by lofty self-control, by that charity which hopeth all things, believeth all things, endureth all things; by such an example, in short, as women now in tens of thousands set to those around them ”

“ Blessed, thrice blessed, is it to find that hero-worship is not yet passed away! that the heart of man still beats young and fresh; that the old tales of David and Jonathan, Damon and Pythias, Socrates and Alcibiades, Shakespeare and his nameless friend, of love “passing the love of woman,” ennobled by its own humility, deeper than death and mightier than the grave, can still blossom out, if it be but in one heart here and there, to show man still how, sooner or later, “he that loveth knoweth God, for God is love.” ”

“ There is a devil’s meaning to everything in nature, and a God’s meaning too. As I read nature’s parable to-night I find nothing in it but hope. What if there be darkness, the sun will rise to-morrow; what if there seem chaos, the great organic world is still living and growing and feeding, unseen by us all the night through; and every phosphoric atom there below is a sign that in the darkest night there is still the power of light, ready to flash out wherever and however it is stirred. ”

“ There is music in heaven, because in music there is no self-will. Music goes on certain laws and rules. Man did not make those laws of music, he has only found them out, and if he be self-willed and break them, there is an end of his music instantly; all he brings out is discord and ugly sounds.
Music is fit for heaven. Music is a pattern and type of heaven, and of the everlasting life of God which perfect spirits live in heaven; a life of melody and order in themselves; a life of harmony with each other and with God. ”

“ Then all the foreign matter, the defilement which earth pours into them, falls to the ground, and into them the trout work up for life and health and food; and through their swift yet yielding eddies—moulding themselves to every accident, yet separate and undefiled—shine up the delicate beauties of the subaqueous world, the Spirit-glories which we can only see in this life through the medium of another human soul, but which we can never see unless that soul is stirred by circumstance into passion and motion and action strong and swift. ”