“ Only one thing is needful--to possess God. The senses, the powers of the soul, and all outward resources are so many vistas opening upon Divinity, so many ways of tasting and adoring God. To be detached from all that is fugitive, and to seize only on the eternal and the absolute, using the rest as no more than a loan, a tenancy! To worship, understand, receive, feel, give, act--this is your law, your duty, your heaven!
After all, there is only one object which we can study, and that is the modes and metamorphoses of the human spirit. ”

“ Most people hold cheaply whatever they understand, and bow down only before the inexplicable. Woman's triumph is to demonstrate the obscurity of that male intelligence which thinks itself so enlightened; and when women inspire love, they are not without the proud joy of this triumph. Their vanity is not altogether baseless; but a profound love is a light and a calm, a religion and a revelation, which in its turn despises these lesser triumphs of vanity. Great souls wish nothing but the great, and all artifices seem shamefully puerile to one immersed in the infinite. ”

“ No matter--he can talk--he has the shibboleth of the true Church--the Bible in his pocket, and a head well stored with notions.
But the quiet, humble, modest, and peaceable person, who is in his practice what the other is only in his profession, who hates a noise, and therefore makes none; who, knowing the snares that are in the world, keeps himself as much out of it as he can, is the Christian that will always stand highest in the estimation of those who bring all characters to the test of true wisdom, and judge of the tree by its fruit. ”

“ A certain grave enthusiasm for the eternal beauty and order; a glowing mind and cloudless goodwill: these are, perhaps, the foundation of wisdom. How inexhaustible is the theme of wisdom! A peaceful aureole surrounds this rich conception. Wisdom includes all treasures of moral experience, and is the ripest fruit of a well-spent life. She never ages, for she is the very expression of order, and order is eternal. Only the wise man tastes all the savour of life and of every age, because only he can recognise their beauty, dignity and worth. ”

“ Abelard remains firm. "Write no more to me, Heloise, write no more to me; 'tis time to end communications which make our penances of no avail," he says. "Let us no more deceive ourselves with remembrance of our past pleasures; we but make our lives troubled and spoil the sweets of solitude. Let us make good use of our austerities, and no longer preserve the memories of our crimes amongst the severities of penance. Let a mortification of body and mind, a strict fasting, continual solitude, profound and holy meditations, and a sincere love of God succeed our former irregularities." ”

“ II.--In Praise of Southey
Reflect on the variety and extent of his acquirements! He stands second to no man, either as a historian or as a bibliographer; and when I regard him as a popular essayist I look in vain for any writer who has conveyed so much information, from so many and such recondite sources, with as many just and original reflections, in a style so lively yet so uniformly classical and perspicuous; no one, in short, who has combined so much wisdom with so much wit; so much truth and knowledge with so much life and fancy. ”

“ Our nature jibes at it, but the better self will submit to it. To hope for justice is the proof of a sickly sensibility; we ought to be able to do without justice. A virile character consists in just that independence. Let the world think of us what it will; that is its affair, not ours. Our business is to act as if our country were grateful, as if the world judged in equity, as if public opinion could see the truth, as if life were just, and as if men were good. ”

“ That mouth cannot be looked upon without desire; in short, no woman can view the person of Abelard without danger. Ask no more to see Abelard; if the memory of him has caused thee so much trouble, Heloise, what would not his presence do? What desires will it not excite in thy soul? How will it be possible to keep thy reason at the sight of so lovable a man?"
She reverts to her delightful dreams about Abelard, when "you press me to you and I yield to you, and our souls, animated with the same passion, are sensible of the same pleasures." ”

“ But I am no longer ashamed that my passion for you had no bounds, for I have done more than all this.
"I have hated myself that I might love you; I came hither to ruin myself in a perpetual imprisonment that I might make you live quietly and at ease. Nothing but virtue, joined to a love perfectly disengaged from the senses, could have produced such effects. Vice never inspires anything like this; it is too much enslaved to the body. This was my cruel uncle's notion; he measured my virtue by the frailty of my sex, and thought it was the man and not the person I loved. ”

“ Live I must not, die I dare not. But as I was walking up and down in the house, a man in a most woeful state, that word of God took hold of my heart: "Ye are justified freely by His grace, through the redemption that is in Jesus Christ." But oh, what a turn it made upon me! At this I was greatly lightened in my mind, and made to understand that God could justify a sinner at any time. And as I was thus in a muse, that Scripture also came with great power upon my spirit: "Not by works of righteousness that we have done, but according to His mercy He hath saved us." ”

“ When I contemplate the common lot of mortality, I must acknowledge that I have drawn a high prize in the lottery of life. I am endowed with a cheerful temper. The love of study, a passion which derives fresh vigour from enjoyment, supplies each day, each hour, with a perpetual source of independent and rational pleasure; and I am not sensible of any decay of the mental faculties. I am disgusted with the affectation of men of letters who complain that they have renounced a substance for a shadow. ”

“ I have never felt the inward assurance of genius, nor the foretaste of celebrity, nor of happiness, nor even the prospect of being husband, father, or respected citizen. This indifference to the future is itself a sign; my dreams are vague, indefinite; I must not now live, because I am now hardly capable of living. Let me control myself; let me leave life to the living, and betake myself to my ideas ”

“ Anxiety, want, passion, simply do not exist. All realism is suppressed as brutal. It is a world which amuses itself with the flattering illusion that it lives above the clouds and breathes mythological air. That is why all vehemence, the cry of Nature, all suffering, thoughtless familiarity, and every frank sign of love shock this delicate medium like a bombshell; they shatter this collective fabric, this palace of clouds, this enchanted architecture, just as shrill cockcrow scatters the fairies into hiding. ”

“ At one moment she is swayed by the sentiment of piety, and next moment she yields up her imagination to all that is amorous and tender. "Among those who are wedded to God I am wedded to a man; among the heroic supporters of the Cross I am the slave of a human desire; at the head of a religious community I am devoted to Abelard alone. Even here I love you as much as ever I did in the world. If I had loved pleasures could I not have found means to gratify myself? I was not more than twenty-two years old, and there were other men left though I was deprived of Abelard. ”

“ Our ideal is no longer the tranquil beauty of the soul, it is the anguish of Laocoon fighting with the hydra of evil. No longer are there happy and accomplished men; we are candidates, indeed, for heaven, but on earth galley-slaves, and we row away our life in the expectation of harbour. It seems possible that this perfecting of which we are so proud is nothing else but a pretentious imperfection.
The "becoming" seems rather negative than positive; it is the lessening of evil, but is not itself the good; it is a noble discontent, but is by no means felicity. ”

“ Oh, enchanting pleasures to which Heloise resigned herself--you, you have been my tormentors! I confess my inconstancy, Abelard, without a blush; let my infidelity teach the world that there is no depending on the promises of women--we are all subject to change. When I tell you what Rival hath ravished my heart from you, you will praise my inconstancy, and pray this Rival to fix it. By this you will know that 'tis God alone that takes Heloise from you."
She explains how she arrived at this decision by being brought to the gates of death by a dangerous illness. Her passion now seemed criminal. ”

“ But at fifteen years of age I was placed in a notary's office; at sixteen I learned to love, and shortly afterwards I saw "Hamlet" played by a touring company. It made a profound impression on me, awakening vast, aimless desires, strange gleams of mystery. A friend of mine, Adolphe de Leuven, himself an ardent versifier, guided me to a first sense of my vocation, and together we set to work as playwrights.
Adolphe and his father went up to live in Paris, and our plays were submitted everywhere in vain. My ardour for the great city grew daily until it became irresistible ”

“ I knew all this constellation, some of them as friends and supporters, others as enemies.
In December, 1823, Talma made perhaps the greatest success of his life in Delavigne's "L'Ecole des Vieillards," in which his power of modulating his voice to the various emotions of old age was superbly shown. But Talma was never content with his triumphs; he awaited eagerly the rise of a new drama; and when I confided to him my ambitions, he would urge me to be quick and succeed within his day. Art was all that he lived for. How wonderful a thing is art, more faithful than a friend or lover! ”

“ His understanding of love, religion, duty, patriotism, is paltry and even shocking. He lacks an ardent generosity. A central dryness, an ill-cloaked egoism show through his supple and rich talent. True, this selfishness of his at least respects everyone's liberty and applauds all originality; but it helps no one, troubles itself for no one, bears no one's burden; in a word, it lacks charity, the great Christian virtue. To his mind perfection lies in personal nobility, and not in love. ”

“ I will, therefore, upon this subject, let you into certain arcana that will be very useful for you to know, but which you must, with the utmost care, conceal and never seem to know.
Women, then, are only children of a larger growth; they have an entertaining tattle, and sometimes wit; but for solid reasoning, good sense, I never knew in my life one that had it, or who reasoned or acted consequentially for four-and-twenty hours together. Some little passion or humour always breaks in upon their best resolutions. ”

“ To John Johnson, Esq.
Weston, June 7, 1790. You never pleased me more than when you told me you had abandoned your mathematical pursuits. It grieved me to think that you were wasting your time merely to gain a little Cambridge fame, not worth having. I cannot be contented that your renown should thrive nowhere but on the banks of the Cam. Conceive a nobler ambition, and never let your honour be circumscribed by the paltry dimensions of a university! ”

“ He advises her to give up her mind to her holy vocation as a means of forgetting him. "Make yourself amends by so glorious a choice; make your virtue a spectacle worthy of men and angels. Drink of the chalice of saints, even to the bottom, without turning your eyes with uncertainty upon me. To forget Heloise, to see her no more, is what Heaven demands of Abelard; and to expect nothing from Abelard, to forget him even as an idea, is what Heaven enjoins on Heloise." ”

“ A mother represents goodness, providence, law, nay, divinity itself, under the only form in which childhood can meet with these high things. If, therefore, she is passionate, she teaches that God is capricious or despotic, or even that there are several gods in conflict. The child's religion depends on the way in which its mother and its father have lived, and not on the way in which they have spoken. The inmost tone of their life is precisely what reaches their child, who finds no more than comedy or empty thunder in their maxims, remonstrances and punishments. ”

“ Schiller's mind was grand by nature, and cultivated by the assiduous study of a life-time. It is not the predominating force of any one faculty that impresses us, but the general force of all. His intellect seems powerful and vast, rather than quick or keen; for he is not notable for wit, though his fancy is ever prompt with his metaphors, illustrations and comparisons. Perhaps his greatest faculty was a half poetical, half philosophical imagination, a faculty teeming with magnificence and brilliancy ”

“ I cannot live if you will not tell me that you still love me.
"When you write to me you will write to your wife; marriage has made such a correspondence lawful and since you can without the least scandal satisfy me why will you not? I am not only engaged by my vows, but I have the fear of my uncle before me. There is nothing, then, that you need dread. You have been the occasion of all my misfortunes, you therefore must be the instrument of my comfort. You cannot but remember (for lovers cannot forget) with what pleasure I have passed whole days in hearing your discourse ”