Paschal Beverly Randolph

“ What a pleasant thing it must be to a sensible and sensitive woman to have, whenever her heart prompts her to express affection—her better half meet her with a storm of coarse and disgusting passion,—the base idea of which must be perfectly withering to her soul. Poor She!—one of thousands!—how ardently must she long for death, and dread even heaven itself, if there is marrying and giving in marriage away over in the upper Land! Amd how such a woman must try to be a Budhist and long for nihility rather than continued life. ”

“ A great cloud rolled away from before my gaze into the vague, dim Æth, and my soul, representing my friend, the man said unto my soul, She did not love you; if she had, this scene could never have occurred. It is but one of millions, this very day, transpiring in thousands of places the wide world over, and is the legitimate result of the wrong relations subsisting between the mated, or rather, mismated marriagees of the earth! Love only can keep souls, and the bodies they wear, true and faithful! Where it does not mutually exist there can be, and is, no guaranty of fidelity. ”

“ The common sense of mankind knows full well that he is no man, but only a satyr, who demands what cannot be granted, save with a shudder of unutterable horror and disgust; pangs past endurance, or at the risk of health and life.
The action of the muscles is as clear an expression of a passion, and the mental states behind it, as are the tones which utter it; for "Actions speak louder than words" is not only a truism, but an absolute and unqualified truth itself. Wherefore if you mean love, look love from top to toe, and all over! ”

“ In this central point, as through and around the corpus callosum, there is, in death, a nervous and spheral waste; in life a brilliant sun varying in size from that of a large pea to a perfectly gorgeous sun-shining diamond three inches in diameter.—A ball of dazzling white fire!—and this is the soul—the being par excellence, the tremendous human mystery. It has a double consciousness; one facing time and its accidents and incidents; the other gazing square and straight right into eternity. ”

“ For there's no more warmth, verve, élan, or passion in her for him, because he has lost the power to evoke them; and while he may, by right of human law, and her sufferance, possess her form, her soul in its secure citadel grimly laughs him to scorn, and despises him with perfect unction, because it knows that every time he profanes her he stabs himself to the heart; for he outrages her soul, and outrage invites, curses, and whomsoever on God's broad earth a Woman curses then and there stays accursed, and horror and defeat follows in his footsteps wherever he may be! ”

“ Deity is never to be seen, for He ever recedes from telescopic or visual scrutiny. But He is always to be felt; and whosoever feels for God is sure to touch and find him! for when we feel for him, he invariably comes forth and whispers to the soul: Here am I! But the inscrutable Being dwells within the Everlasting Shadow,—behind the Everlasting Flame; for He is the Eternal Fire! and the quintessence of All Heat; not the heat of combustion, but its opposites, like unto that which is evolved from within our souls when we truly Love. ”

“ She lives!—lives with the rich blood of the South in her veins; with the vigor of the North in her constitution; with the clear brains of the temperate zone, the depth of thought of the Orient, the versatility of France, and earnestness of purpose, and boldness of resolution of the New World; lives these three hundred years that you think her dead, as she lived the countless centuries before you thought her born; and may she never cease to have a fitting casket for her jewels, and remain a reflex of the glorious truth and beauty of the superlative wisdom, power and goodness. ”

“ We, who ourselves, Men of Eulis, beholding the curses and contrasts of the present civilization—this thing that shines so bright, yet nurses Murder at its breasts,—this thing that glitters with the Beauté du Diable,—strive by lifting the veil to show the concealed horror; and to warn mankind against it. We believe not in any form of concubinage or libertinism, but we do not use the same weapons against them that others are accustomed to. We propose to make every man and woman master and mistress of themselves, and enable them to detect the paste from the diamond! ”

“ But I feel quite as much indignant contempt for that large class of women who are ever ready to use their beauty as a trap to catch male gudgeons; who look on all men as fair game, to be lied to, and played on, generally to the tune of rustling silks, and crisp bank notes; and whose utter heartlessness belies the index of their sex. There's quite as many heartless shes as hes in the world; only that one soulless woman is a greater danger to the world than a dozen scoundrelly men; for her sex gives her points of advantage denied to all of the opposite gender. A good, true woman is a diamond ”

“ God struck the universe into being by a single fiat of his Imperial Will; but it took even him billions of centuries to gestate and bring forth man; just as a man occupies one second of time only, to plant a monad in the uterine soil, but it takes woman forty odd weeks to prepare it for its uses on the earth; or it takes man one second to begin a work, which occupies all the energies of woman's soul and body about twenty-six million seconds to complete what he began! Hence one good mother is worth at least fifty millions of male drones, without love to guide them heavenwards ”

“ Now, when he or she thus born, encounters those of opposite gender, who are full of love, they cling to such with the tenacity of death itself, until they sap out the full soul, and fill their empty ones. What care they even though desolation, despair and death follow in their footsteps, and all their tracks are blood spots from hearts that they have broken? For so long as these leeches get their fill, no matter what evil betides those upon whom they feed,—and whom they ruin. These ghouls have no principle, declare love with like fervor to every one they meet ”