Chautauqua Institution

“ But self-culture forgets that a candle is no type of you and me. We are human spirit-lamps, whose rays should be directed and intensified by the blow-pipe of an unceasing purpose; for we are all so made that unless we will to light up other lives, we can never do so to the limit of our power. Self-culture is never base; it is often noble, but it can never be the noblest aim of all. ”

“ No man could represent us so well as a poet, teacher, essayist and scholar like Mr. Lowell. He could represent us at the level of those ideals and achievements of which we are not ashamed. We despise nothing so heartily as illiterate wealth; no other people on earth equal us in contempt for the commerce which has only sordid aims and results. The American merchant builds schools, museums, churches, asylums, hospitals—if he does not we despise him.
The problem in selecting the best foreign representatives is to secure men who will represent our national character. ”

“ The people who spend all their strength in absorbing are failures and parasites. It is alike the business of the sun and of the soul to radiate every particle of light that they can muster. There is reason to believe that this is precisely what they are for. And so, having made sure of your light, strength and discipline, strike out from the warm and radiant center of a self-poised brain and heart, into the lives about you, and you will find that “What is good for the hive is also good for the bee.” ”

“ At his bidding truth leaped over the cloister walls and challenged every man to make her his guest; aroused every intelligence to acts of private judgment, changed a dependent, recipient people into a reflecting, inquiring people; lifted each human being out of the castes of the middle age, to endow him with individuality, and summoned man to stand forth as man. The world heaved with the fervent conflict of opinion. The people and their guides recognized the dignity of labor; the oppressed peasantry took up arms for liberty; men reverenced and exercised the freedom of the soul. ”

“ Thousands of people have just begun to find out how little they really know, and how much they ought yet to learn, to satisfy their own ideas and notions as to what is required to make one, not learned, indeed, but reasonably well informed! And what they think they need to know, they feel sure that they have now discovered how to learn, and have acquired habits of reading and thinking which will make the processes easy and enjoyable, instead of laborious and tiresome. ”

“ Two thirds of the Church of Christ are women. By the freer life and richer opportunity which you and I enjoy; by society’s growing tolerance, not to say its kindly appreciation, of our activities; by the heart transformed and the peace imparted through the gospel, the voice of our Redeemer pleads for our consecrated service. I would not undervalue the culture of the intellect, but would exalt the culture of the heart. ”

“ Long ago in a dull, old street, making part of an equally dull and colorless part of old New York, a very solitary child extracted such amusement from life as forty feet of back yard could afford. He sat in his small rocking-chair and listened to the talk about him, growing a little paler, a little more uncanny all the time, till one day when a country cousin appeared, and, horrified that anything so old and weazened could call itself a boy, begged that he might go home with her. ”

“ By the aid of a little imagination as one reads, he can see again the spare form, and the face lighted up with enthusiasm and love; can hear the voice rapidly and earnestly uttering the words which point out plainly and simply the way of life. While, without this help, those who never heard him will find great pleasure and profit in reading the book. ”

“ The look of content, and of being established for an indefinite time, with which any one of them sat on the sofa before a dull chance acquaintance, was an imprint, no doubt, of their idle life, but it was also the imprint of an exquisite training. It was the quintessence of the aristocratic manner.
We do not want gilded uselessness; far better remain as we are; busy, even if chiefly for ourselves; but there are some who, in the midst of hard work, have been wise enough to leave spare time in their plan of life for casual meetings with their fellows. ”

“ I can readily see how a college graduate, just released from the recitation room, with lofty ideals of scholarship, and with really a vast amount of knowledge, might depreciate with a tone of contempt such a work as that of Dr. Wilkinson. I can see, too, how that smile of contempt from a scholar with local reputation might annoy and afflict less cultivated people belonging to a local circle who, devoted to an institution, are anxious that it and its text-books should receive the commendation of cultivated men. ”

“ Sweet friends, it is because the ideal of woman’s place in the world is changing in the average mind. For as the artist’s ideal precedes his picture, so the ideal woman must be transformed before the actual one can be. In an age of brute force, the warrior galloping away to his adventures waved his mailed hand to the lady fair who was enclosed for safe keeping in a grim castle with moat and drawbridge. But to-day, when spirit force grows regnant, a woman can circumnavigate the globe alone, without danger of an uncivil word, much less of violence. ”

“ In childhood the consciousness of immortal life buds forth feeble, though full of promise. In the man it unfolds its fragrant petals, his most celestial flower, to mature its seed throughout eternity. The prospect of that everlasting life, the perfect justice yet to come, the infinite progress before us, cheer and comfort the heart. Sad and dissatisfied, full of self-reproach, we shall not be so forever. The light of heaven breaks upon the night of trial, sorrow, sin ”

“ Do not, I beseech you, fail to protest against false, querulous and impertinent criticisms, and against that hyper-criticism which delights in nothing so much as in pointing out faults and defects, losing sight of the great things in excessive eagerness to detect slight inaccuracies.
Remember that no book is placed upon the course that does not have the personal approval of the best critics, and remember, moreover, that it will never be possible to provide a book which is above criticism. As one of our Counselors writes:
“Good books have always been criticised upon some points adversely. ”

“ Why should the reigning belle be so nice with her tongue and her smile, and the older woman, who probably feels the want of affection far more keenly, be quite oblivious that this same winning kindliness which she has so long ceased to exhibit, and has replaced by the dry manner of formal endurance, would, perhaps as promptly as the wand of Cinderella’s god-mother, transform some of these prim callers into life-long friends. ”

“ As the Louvre gallery proves that when men were but the parasites of the court they too decked themselves with ear-rings, high heels, powdered hair and gaudy garments, so the distorted figures in the detestable fashion plates of to-day are the irrefutable proofs of woman’s fractional estate; but this will not be so to-morrow, when she finds her kingdom—which is her own true self. ”

“ Samuel Johnson used to say that he did all his hard study when he was a boy, and he very properly lamented it. It is one of the strangest things in modern civilization that, except among a small body of professors and specialists, the world does its studying entirely in early life. If the chance to study, or the compulsion to study, be wanting in the first twenty years, the door is supposed to be shut forever. The Chautauqua movement tried to expose the folly of this method, and to show that persons whose education was neglected in youth may secure culture in middle life, or even in old age. ”

“ Lowell has, under different circumstances, developed a new line of diplomatic representation. He has represented the character and culture of the American people. The average politician supposes himself to be the typical American; the fact that we are ashamed of him is the sufficient proof that he is thoroughly mistaken. In what do Americans broadly differ from most other, if not all other, peoples? Is it not in this, that we are the great reading nation of the world? Our culture goes down to the bottom and reaches out to the extremities of our life. ”

“ Behold the words which the Canadian legislature has inscribed on the walls of her educational institutions. The state unites itself to the two systems of religion in the matter of education, and does not authorize any school to be atheistical, but demands of it to be Christian before it accords help. It does not provide that one church shall be helped rather than another. Full and entire liberty it demands, and from this comes perfect harmony among the people. ”

“ The courtesy of the world is an imposing form.... But the courtesy of a Christian is not a mere form. It is not the phantasm of a feeling which has no real existence. It is the outward expression of an inward disposition, the conduct which a benevolent mind will on all occasions instinctively prescribe. It is the natural and unconstrained operation of unfeigned love. Let us but love our neighbor as ourselves, and it will be morally impossible to violate the laws of courtesy ”

“ For after four years of reading and study the students find that they have not come to the end, but only to the beginning. The matter selected for them has been so good, so substantial, and really so inspiring, as a whole, that an immortal, if not divine, sort of hunger for the best in literature, science, art, philosophy, has been created in their minds, and they could hardly stop if they desired. ”

“ We conclude this article on the chemistry of organisms, with the somewhat humbling reflection that to all living beings there comes a time when vitality yields to the power of those chemical forces, which resolve them again to their original inorganic forms. It can not be that this was the only and ultimate end contemplated by the Creator, in that sublime system of arrangement for life, which began with the morning of creation and ended with man. Nature is more than a cycle of change from dead matter to vegetable form, thence to animal life, and thence back again to mineral substance. ”

“ One Means of Helping Russia.—But there is no obstacle which can not be overcome by energy, spirit of sacrifice, and courage. The Russian despotism must and will be destroyed; for it is not permitted to the stupid obstinacy of one, nor to the infamous egotism of a few, to arrest the progress and light of a nation of a hundred million souls. We can only wish the mode of execution of the unavoidable may be the least disastrous, least sanguinary, and most humane. ”

“ And if the great Intercessor appears there for a transgressor, how does his intercession succeed? Though a whole world should protest against it, his prayer saves whom he will. His voice penetrates the heart of the eternal Father with irresistible power. ”

“ A second stroke of policy finds them gathered in her parlor and she clinches her work by giving them an insight into practical employments—not pleasures, mind you—but work, for women at home. The interest excited quickens them all. They become alert, capable, quick-witted, and suddenly see in each other much of which they had never before dreamed. The false barriers between women invariably fall before a common interest. ”

“ She will come into government and purify it, into politics and cleanse that Stygian pool as the waters of Marah were cleansed; for woman will make homelike every place she enters, and she will enter every place on this round earth. Any custom, or traffic, or party, on which a woman can not look with favor is irrevocably doomed. Its welcome of her presence and her power is to be the final test of its fitness to survive. All Gospel civilization is radiant with the demonstration of this truth:
“It is not good for man to be alone.” ”