Frank Crane

“ Thus, although great ideals present themselves to men as beneficial, yet in the carrying out of them men often become cruel, unjust, and tyrannical. So the greatest crimes of earth are committed under the influence of movements designed to do the greatest good.
Under the church we have seen persecution, a ruthless disregard of human feeling, families torn asunder, opinion coerced, bodies tortured.
The humanities in time destroyed the baleful power of the religious ideal, its dreams of dominance and its inhuman fanaticism. ”

“ It is good that the greater part of the world is in love. For love is the Song of Songs. To the young lover Nature is transformed. Some Ithuriel has touched the deadly commonplace; all is miraculous. The moon, the dead companion to our earth, the pale and washed-out pilgrim of the sky, has been changed into a silver-fronted fairy whose beams thrill him with a heady enchantment. Every breeze has its secret. ”

“ In the little affairs of a day it seems sometimes as if the wicked prosper. The gambler is flush, the lecher flourishes, the swindler gets away with his swag, and the pirate, the assassin, and the robber feast on their booty. 112 But when this sort of thing is stretched out over any considerable space of time or territory, so that the cosmic laws, which move slowly, have a chance, it is sure to break down.
What we call righteousness and justice is just as much a part of nature as the physical laws. ”

“ The great, useful, redeeming, and lasting work of the world is that work which is a reaction from idleness. The continent of labor is barren. It is the little island of labor that is green and fruitful in the sea of leisure.
The curse of America is its deification of labor. Our little gods are the men who are ceaselessly forthputting. ”

“ Rich people are not those who earn large salaries. They are those who handle money, who make money earn money.
Of course, in this argument we exclude two classes—those who have money given them, by inheritance or otherwise, and those who get money by chance. These two classes merely step into money some one else has made.
But very few people get rich, for the simple reason that money-making requires a certain order of genius. Money-makers are born. They have a natural gift. ”

“ Charity makes the Old Man of the Sea feed sugar-plums to the poor devil he is riding and choking; justice would make him get off his victim’s back.
Conventional charity piously accepts things as they are, and helps the unfortunate; justice goes to the legislature and changes things.
Charity swats the fly; justice takes away the dung-heaps that breed flies.
Charity gives quinine in the malarial tropics; justice drains the swamps.
Charity sends surgeons and ambulances and trained nurses to the war; justice struggles to secure that internationalism that will prevent war. ”

“ The man whose increase of contentment is most assured, as he grows older, is the one who has discovered how to enjoy his past.
To many of us the past is always sad. We turn from it with impatience. “Man never is, but always to be, blest.” Naturally this habit of mind sees in the ever-shortening future nothing but tragedy. ”

“ Nothing can cure them but an eleven-foot swatter. And these are not for sale.
Some men are just as bad. Married to a superior woman such a man is inwardly galled by his own conscious inferiority. So he bedevils her in ways indirect. He enjoys seeing her in a state of suppressed indignation. He keeps her on edge. His persecution is all the more unbearable because it is the unconscious expression of his fly nature. Also for him there is no cure but to wait till he lights some time and swat him with some giant, Gargantuan swatter. ”

“ Many a delicate child has been more horribly tormented by suggested fears than he could ever have been hurt by corporal punishment.
The most deeply moral lesson any mother can instil into her child is that he be UNAFRAID—of anything in life or death. And whoso teaches a child a fear has made an incurable wound in his soul. ”

“ Among savages the women do all the work. In the coming civilization they shall do none. The progress of the race is the progress of the female from toil to leisure.
Every woman is a possible mother. She should have only to grow and to be strong. She should be the real aristocracy, the real Upper Class, to give culture and beauty to life. She should have time to attend to the duties of her eternal priesthood. ”

“ I said. “But what keys you up to live, what stimulates and inspires you, is not the happiness you have had, but the happiness you expect to have.
“The surest, stablest thing in life is heaven. It rests upon the enduring stones of hope. Its pillars are all of the alabaster of anticipation. It is a city of eternity, not of time. Therefore it is that its gates are never shut, night nor day.”
118 THE BEST OF LIFE
You say, my dear Anushka, that you have nothing but your dreams; you are full of dreams; drunk every day with ideals. ”

“ Creative work is the scarcest in the world. And the most underpaid. And the amount of hard work a man puts upon a thing is no gauge of its value—often quite the contrary—for it is the same shrewd Leonardo who observed, Quante piu un’ arte porte seco fatica di corpo, tanto piu e vile, or “The more bodily fatigue goes into a work of art, the viler it is.”
Men must work. In the forepart of the Scriptures it is laid down that “in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” and such labor perhaps will always be the most part of the world’s work. ”

“ The world could get along without its war lords, millionaires, and big men, with all their effective virility, better than it could do without its blind, deaf, hunchbacked, and bedridden. Some things we get from the first group, but the things we get from the second are more needed for this star-led race. ”

“ The money-makers are the real kings of modern life, because vulgarly we measure all things, including human worth, by dollars.
If you make ten thousand dollars a year at your job it is only because your employer is making more than that amount out of your services. He is the player; you are the chessman. ”

“ The thrifty man lays up money for his old age. The farmer lays up fodder for his winter feeding. The medical student lays up information for use in his future practise. The intelligent, by due exercise and diet, lay up health, and the wastrel lays up trouble and disease by his excesses.
All of us lay up something, willy-nilly.
It is a good idea to ask one’s self, in considering any act we are about to perform, not only what will be the immediate pleasure in it, but what sort of product we are laying up for ourselves by it.
We are always coming into our inheritance from our past deeds. ”

“ In making up your mind it is well to take into consideration what happiness dividend the transaction is going to bring you ten years from now.
The world you live in is formed on the laying-up principle. Nature gains her ends as a child learns to walk and talk, by infinite repetitions. ”

“ There is a level of efficiency, but no progress.
Boards, trustees, and institutions lay great stress upon precedent, as they fear responsibility. To do as our predecessors did shifts the burden of blame a bit from our shoulders.
The precedent is the haven of refuge for them that fear to decide.
Courts of law follow precedent, on the general theory that experience is more just than individual decision.
Precedent, however, tends to carry forward the ignorance and injustice of the past.
Mankind is constantly learning, getting new views of truth, seeing new values in social justice. ”

“ When we have justice we shall have peace, as it is written: “Righteousness and peace kiss each other.”
Lastly, we shall have free Spiritual Fraternity. The problem of the race is one of 13 fraternizing. We now get together in sects and nations. Religiously and politically we as yet feel but faintly the universal breeze. We do not realize humanity. The human nerve is feeble. Some day the idea of universal brotherhood shall burn in the race with a heat and shine far stronger than the present sectarian, partisan, and patriotic enthusiasms. ”

“ It’s the human touch that beautifies. Nothing can be warmly beautiful that is not, or was not, useful.
And Democracy is beautiful because it exists for the welfare of the People that compose it, and not for the glory of the Dynasty that rules it. ”

“ All your years slant upward. Before you life stretches out as a vast untried adventure. Love is yet to come, and success, and a career. Let me, who am over the hillcrest and on the westering slope, talk to you a bit. ”

“ We are so occupied in getting ready to live that we have lost the art of living.
With us a man is a fool if he sets about to enjoy himself before he has laid up a fortune. We count the woman happy when she has married money, and the child accursed when he has no inheritance. ”

“ If the Hohenzollern crowd had met no resistance in Belgium, if they had conquered Paris as they hoped, if they had crushed England, if they had realized to the full their dream of dominance over Europe and the whole world, their structure would have crumbled just the same, because it would have been reared upon violence, inhumanity, faithlessness, and fraud. ”

“ Every day is for future days. Every sensation and every act of will, everything I do, has a bearing upon the me that shall be ten years from this time—a thousand, a million years hence—who knows?
Hence, if any one chooses to believe that, after this long getting-ready, Nature is going to throw me, body and soul, back into the scrap-heap, let him believe it.
100
Nature ought to have as much sense as I have. And I certainly would not go to all the pains Nature takes in preparing a human spirit only to fling my product at last into the ditch.
101 HUMAN FLIES
Oh for a human fly-swatter! ”

“ The work of the world could be easily done by males between the ages of twenty-one and sixty. To accomplish this, all that is needed is to abolish militarism, that insane burden of men in idleness, abolish all piled-up 54 wealth-units that keep husky males workless, and abolish our worship of activity.
Then there would be plenty of work for every man to keep him from want, and plenty of leisure for every man to preserve in him a living soul. ”

“ This world is an insolvable puzzle to human reason. It is full of the most absurd 48 antinomies, the most distressing cruelties, the most amazing contradictions. No wonder men’s minds take refuge in stubborn stoicism, in agnosticism, in blank unfaith. ”

“ Precedent is often the inertia of monstrous iniquity. War, for instance, is due 21 to the evil custom of nations who go on in the habit of war-preparedness. The problem of the twentieth century is to batter down this precedent by the blows of reason, to overturn it by an upheaval of humanity.
Evil precedent also lurks in social conditions, in business, and in all relations of human rights. The past constantly operates to enslave the present. ”

“ One would think he would be a gloom and a burden; he is an uplift. You soon forget his limitations. You soon cease to pity him, for he does not pity himself. He does not drain you; he inspires you.
In how many another family is the sickroom the shrine of the house. How many a stricken invalid woman is the resting-place for her worried husband, the delightful refuge for her children’s cares!
It is not the strong, wealthy, and powerful 7 that always gleam with optimism and radiate hope. Too often the house of luxury is the nest of bitterness, boredom, and snarling. ”

“ Disgust is the shadow cast by love. Where there is no shadow there is no substance.
The worth of a wife’s affection is exactly measured by her horror of disloyalty.
We climb by love; the rungs of the ladder are disgusts. ”

“ The one everlasting faculty of mankind is anticipation. The one inexhaustible fountain of joy is hope. Those whose happiness is located in the land of hope will always be happy.
“Heaven is in the future, because the future is infinite. Besides, the future is the only time when we can be happy without alloy. The past, even as to the pleasantest moments of it, is always a little sad. So no one’s heaven is in the past. The present is fleeting, sinking every minute into the darkness of the past. So no man’s heaven is in 117 the present. In the future alone is pure, ideal, untainted joy. ”

“ Charity is affected by symptoms; justice by causes.
Charity assumes evil institutions and customs to be a part of “Divine Providence,” and tearfully works away at taking care of the wreckage; justice regards injustice everywhere, custom-buttressed and respectable or not, as the work of the devil, and vigorously attacks it.
Charity is timid and is always passing the collection-box; justice is unafraid and asks no alms, no patrons, no benevolent support.
“It is presumed,” says Henry Seton Merriman, “that the majority of people are willing enough to seek the happiness of others ”

“ Many a shopkeeper has been ruined trying 69 to get rich, not realizing that he is not a money-maker, but a money-earner.
And many and many a widow has lost all her insurance money by imagining that, being possessed of a tidy lump sum, she could increase it rapidly by shrewd investment. She does not understand that in speculating in real estate or buying stocks she is pitting her inexperience against genius and trained ability. ”