Everyman

“ Your virtues, and the graces of mind and character upon which you pride yourself—your strength and composure, your patience and devotion to duty, your honesty, your justice, your purity—all these belong not only to yourself but to the society which has produced you and of which you are a part. ”

“ Hitherto the life-blood has been gradually chilling in your veins, as you sat aloof within your circle of gentility, while the rest of the world was fighting out its battle with one kind of necessity or another. Henceforth you will at least have the sense of natural and healthy effort for a purpose, and of lending your strength—be it great or small—to the united struggle of mankind. ”

“ The truth is, we each of us have an inborn conviction that the whole world, with everybody and everything in it, was created as a sort of necessary appendage to ourselves. Our fellow men and women were made to admire us, and to minister to our various requirements. ”

“ Tones of the human mind may be different, but they should be Chord and discord concordant in order to blend properly. Unselfish ambition, noble life-motives, and purity, — these constituents of thought, mingling, constitute individually and collectively true happiness, strength, and permanence. ”

“ I now feel certain that before we can reach the individualism which we crave—and have tried to claim too soon—we must first know such participation as hers in all conscious life—in all life, conscious or unconscious. ”

“ And nevertheless, your future and your past, your aspect of individuality, and of freedom, and the various aspects wherein you are dependent upon the rest of the world, your whole life of deeds, and your attainment of your individual goal through your deeds, — all these manifold facts that are yours and that constitute you, are present at once to the Absolute, — as facts in the world, as temporal contents eternally viewed, — as a process eternally finished, — but eternally finished precisely by virtue of the temporal sequence of your deeds. ”

“ By this perpetually-renewed casting down of the hard barriers of individuality, these willing submissions to the compelling rhythm of a larger existence than that of the solitary individual or even of the human group--by this perpetual widening, deepening, and unselfing of your attentiveness--you are to enlarge your boundaries and become the citizen of a greater, more joyous, more poignant world, the partaker of a more abundant life. ”

“ Let us look to the One life as our model, and turn to Him who lived it on our earth, as to the guide, and friend, and helper, who alone can strengthen the feeble knees, and lift up the fainting heart. ”

“ And in that day shall be discovered every inward working of every human soul: every appetite, passion, inclination, affection, with the various combinations of them, with every temper and disposition that constitute the whole complex character of each individual. ”

“ In human form I move with all humanity through endless ages,—to kings and counselors, to priests and scientists, to thinkers and teachers, to old and young, I come in the shape their pride or vice demands, and am as one with all. ”

“ They are deeper than can be told, and belong to the immensities and eternities. They reach down to that depth where society itself originates and disappears,—where the question is, Which is first, man or men?—where the individual is lost in his source. ”

“ If time permitted I could take up every occupation, every avocation, every profession and every calling, and show you that no matter which way we turn—no matter what we do—we are always and everywhere weighing the Soul. ”

“ Rest on the human faces that pass by,
Each with its gay or busy interest:
And then I muse upon their lot, and read
Many a lesson in their changeful cast,
And so grow kind of heart, as if the sight
Of human beings were humanity. ”

“ Even to the tired faces of my work-folks that shining morning lent a light that was hope. Without knowing it, they felt themselves a vital part of the reborn world, sharers in its joy because they were the children of the common lot, the common people for whom the world is, and without whom no world could be. ”

“ What is the nature of that subtle and majestic principle which attaches us to a few persons, not so much by personal as by the most spiritual ties? What is the quality of the persons who, without being public men, or literary men, or rich men, or active men, or (in the popular sense) religious men, have a certain salutary omnipresence in all our life’s history, almost giving their own quality to the atmosphere and the landscape? ”

“ I doubt not you have often heard the saying, ‘One half the world little knows how the other half lives;’ and, indeed, we have but little idea of the shifts to which thousands of our fellow men are put, and of the discomforts and troubles of their daily life. ”

“ All topics were broached,—life, love, marriage, sex, hatred, suicide, magic, theism, art, poetry, religion, myself, thyself, all selves, and whatever else, with a security and vivacity which belonged to the nobility of the parties and to their brave truth. The life of these persons was conducted in the same calm and affirmative manner as their discourse. Life with them was an experiment continually varied, full of results, full of grandeur, [Pg 80] and by no means the hot and hurried business which passes in the world. The delight in good company, in pure, brilliant, social atmosphere ”

“ In enlarged conversation we have suggestions that require new ways of living, new books, new men, new arts and sciences. By sympathy, each opens to the eloquence, and begins to see with the eyes of his mind. We were all lonely, thoughtless; and now a principle appears to all: we see new relations, many truths; every mind seizes them as they pass; each catches by the mane one of these strong coursers like horses of the prairie, and rides up and down in the world of the intellect. ”

“ And he shows how the prodigious strength of the great common emotions that occasionally arise results from the fact that they have grown up out of the most commonplace ordinary acts of daily life, speaking, walking, talking, by which the life of each man in a group mingles with the common life of all. ”

“ And he was. He talked with men; ate with men; lived with men; understood men. Scales that dip into earth-dust and swing again to regions of exquisite idealism—the eternal weight and counter-weight of Self. ”

“ It sometimes seems as if knowing, in the best sense, were a kind of rotary-person process, a being everybody in a row, a state of living symposium. The interpenetrating, blending-in, digesting period comes in due course, the time of settling down into himself, and behold the man is made, a unified, concentrated, individual, universal man—a focused everybody. ”

“ He goes up and down the world of men, a modern Rhadamanthus in gold-headed cane and peruke, and with nonchalance, and the air of a referee, distributing souls. The warm, many-weathered, passionate-peopled world is to him a grammar of hieroglyphs, or an emblematic freemason’s procession. ”

“ How much to strengthen or to weaken us; to clear or to cloud our moral atmosphere; to make us fresh and decisive, or to slowly sap our virtue! But it is a more solemn task to compute the influences that proceed from us, and to discover how, unknown to ourselves, we are swaying the circles of other lives. ”

“ May we not, then, look forward to the time when “the best that has anywhere been in the [Pg 106] world shall be the lot of every man born into it”—that is to say, the lot of every man who desires the best? ”

“ It is in real truth the eternal and natural expression and embodiment of a form of life higher than that of the individual—that common life of mutual helpfulness, stimulation, and contest which gives leave and opportunity to the individual life, makes it possible, makes it full and complete. ”

“ Towards whom are you to cultivate goodwill? Naturally, one would answer: Towards the whole of humanity. But the whole of humanity, as far as you are concerned, amounts to naught but a magnificent abstract conception. ”

“ Take heed that from his hands thou nothing take."
We ask the whole. Nothing less will content us. We arraign society, if it do not give us besides earth, and fire, and water, opportunity, love, reverence, and objects of veneration. ”

“ Since, then, the pleasures of each class and the life of each are in dispute, and the question is not which life is more or less honorable, or better or worse, but which is the more pleasant or painless—how shall we know who speaks truly? ”

“ The good soul nourishes me and unlocks new magazines of power and enjoyment to me every day. I will not meanly decline the immensity of good, because I have heard that it has come to others in another shape.
Besides, why should we be cowed by the name of Action? ’Tis a trick of the senses,—no more. We know that the ancestor of every action is a thought. ”

“ Again and again it has finally been obliged to yield, this “whole world,” before a single soul; and we often experience yet to-day, in the smallest as in the greatest questions, the truth of the bold saying, “Who firmly holds to his mind, will fashion the world to himself.” ”

“ As your own practical sympathy with and understanding of other lives, your realisation of them, may be narrowed and stiffened to include no more than the family group, or spread over your fellow-workers, your class, your city, party, country, or religion--even perhaps the whole race--till you feel yourself utterly part of it, moving with it, suffering with it, and partake of its whole conscious life ”

“ But when we turn to the experience of individuals, we meet with the most unlimited application of our subject. The life of every one is a standing memento of its truth. For who is there, that has come to his present stand-point in life, by the route that he had marked out for himself? ”

“ Thus would humanity, as a collective man, having passed through the fiery furnace of affliction—into which it was brought by its own errors and evils,—come forth, at length, purified and humbled, acknowledging and worshiping its God, and receiving with childlike thankfulness His gracious gifts and blessings. ”

“ What mind, regulated by the ordinary principles of human belief, can possibly hold that every one of the thousand vital points which swim in a drop of stagnant water are inherently fitted to maintain their individuality throughout eternity? ”

“ On deliberate choice, and from grounds of character, he has elected his part to live and die for, and dies with grandeur. This race has added new elements to humanity, and has a deeper root in the world. ”

“ And thus, gentlemen, did the last act of this illustrious man’s existence accord with that leading principle of his well-spent life—the desire to promote the universal happiness and welfare of mankind. ”

“ I was continually haunted by the idea of individual action, movement or initiative, and I believe it refers to that state when life divorced from its old interior unity with the source of life, and, confined in a form begins in its imagination of itself to be an ego, is in a state of outgoing, acts and looks outward, touches and tastes ”

“ Or here is one who, seeing the wishes of men, knows how to come at their end; whispers to this friend, argues down that adversary, moulds society to his purpose, and looks at all men as wax for his hands,—takes command of them as the wind does of clouds, as the mother does of the child, or the man that knows more does of the man that knows less ”

“ First of all, I must try to get my living honestly,—that is, learn not to live upon the shoulders of others; and while learning this, and after I have learned it, to try on every occasion to be of use to men with my hands and with my feet, as well as with my brain and my heart, and with all of me that is wanted by men. ”

“ The workers in the fields below look up and envy us our abode of glory and delight! If they think it pleasant, surely we should be content. Have we not been taught to live for others and not for ourselves, and are we not acting up bravely to the teaching—in this most curious method? ”

“ And I shall hope, by and by, to show that you cannot be social without also being ornamental; it is the beginning of that connecting link which shall presently make men realise that life is one, and that all life is good. ”

“ Under the regime of prescribed routine, of life with regard to the hereafter, and of mysterious powers of all sorts, more or less in good standing in the realm of the unworldly, personal individuality, though in itself not without some honour, was valued chiefly and primarily for the different conditions, the different relations to the things of this world, and the different views of these things, which men succeeded in overcoming, or rather in completely denying and eschewing. ”

“ You'll be exactly what you are, I charitably admit—nothing more or less, nothing different. But you'll be it all in a different way. We live in an age of prodigious machinery, all organised to a single end. ”

“ The whole individual life that expresses and presents the meaning of any single idea. But you will still properly be dissatisfied. You will say: “Are not the individuals as various as are all our various ideas? And how are these individuals of which you have so far spoken to be related to what we mean when we talk of individual men, of souls, of moral personalities, or of one man as different from any other man?” ”

“ His spirit state was revealed to me as among those arisen workers and reformers, whose work for humanity he loved and shared on earth, and learning of the wise ones,—a vast and wonderful sphere of individualities, who are still laboring for the good of humanity. ”