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“ I am positive I have a soul; nor can all the books with which materialists have pester’d the world ever convince me to the contrary. ”

“ 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? ”

“ So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect,—What is truth? and of the affections,—What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. ”

“ Have you suffered, starved, and triumphed grovelled, down, yet grasped at glory,
Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole?
[27] "Done things" just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story,
Seeing through the nice veneer the naked soul?
Have you seen God in His splendours, heard the text that nature renders?
(You'll never hear it in the family pew.)
The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do things—
Then listen to the wild—it's calling you. ”

“ For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life, and of that practical organisation of life that we call society. ”

“ Down below them, is another question which is included in them all and which sooner or later must be faced by each and every one of us: "Why am I here on earth? Has my life any purpose in the great, everlasting scheme of things? What is that purpose?" ”

“ And what ye have called the world shall but be created by you: your reason, your likeness, your will, your love, shall it itself become! ”

“ What a world is ours. What a problem is life. Is there any word in the English language more suggestive? Life—its surroundings, aspects, all its outward associations. Is this the limit? Would to Heaven in some instances it were so, that the end be thus. ”

“ Thy people,... when they have finished reaping one field, they begin to plough another; and, if the day were not enough, I have seen them plough by moonlight. What is their life to ours,—the life that is as naught to them? Blind that they are, they lose it all! But we live in the present. ”

“ Who shall explain and disentangle those high and restless and interwoven emotions with which intellectual ambition, honourable and ardent, gazes upon that solemn thing with which, in which, for which it lives and labours,—the Human Multitude? ”

“ Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment. ”

“ This universal soul, he calls Reason: it is not mine or thine or his, but we are its; we are its property and men. And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason. ”

“ All these details I saw at a glance; but what fixed my attention was the expression of goodness, nobleness, and power, that pervaded the whole—the truly human heart and nature that shone in the eyes. As our eyes met, she said, “C’est vous,” and held out her hand. ”

“ Or, shall I state it thus?—The astonishment of life, is, the absence of any appearance of reconciliation between the theory and practice of life. ”

“ What stillness and depth of manner are communicated to all who sound the deeps of life! what a refuge is their society from wit, zeal, and gossip, from petty estimates and demands! To these, now first encountered, we have been always known ”

“ Now the sort of 'fact of experience' on which in my book I have proposed to compromise, is the so-called 'mental state,' in whose existence not only common men but philosophers have uniformly believed. ”

“ We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; ”

“ Could one sketch a sounder scaffolding on which to build all the odd divergencies—crankinesses and heroisms, stupidities and engagingnesses—which may go to make the edifice of an average decent soul's material, mental and spiritual habitation? ”

“ The historians drop no hint that its sufferings, its affections, its relations, were more than human,—raised indeed to distinction by miraculous accompaniments; but intrinsically, however signally, human. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Elements and principles mingle, combine, wed, multiply with each other, to such a point that the material and the moral world are brought eventually to the same clearness. The phenomenon is perpetually returning upon itself. ”

“ Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth.” ”

“ It is just because all meanings, in the end, will prove to be internal meanings, that this which the internal meaning most loves, namely the presence of concrete fulfilment, of life, of pulsating and originative will, of freedom, and of individuality, will prove, for our view, to be of the very essence of the Absolute Meaning of the world. ”

“ They reckon up several sorts of pleasures, which they call true ones; some belong to the body, and others to the mind. The pleasures of the mind lie in knowledge, and in that delight which the contemplation of truth carries with it; to which they add the joyful reflections on a well- spent life, and the assured hopes of a future happiness. ”

“ Around thee are the institutions, the ideals, the knowledge and beliefs, ethical or intellectual, in which that work, that life, have been so far fragmentarily and partially realised. Submit thyself and press forward. Thou knowest well what it means to be better: more pure, more loving, more self-denying. ”

“ I do not think we are deceived to grow,
But that the crudest fancy, slightest show,
Covers some separate truth that we may know.
In the one Truth, each separate fact is true;
Eternally in one I many view,
And destinies through destiny pursue. ”

“ If you have any sensibility or imagination, this will establish such an intercourse between you and the Supreme Being, as will be of infinite consequence to you in life. It will communicate an habitual cheerfulness to your tempers, give a firmness and steadiness to your virtue, and enable you to go through all the vicissitudes of human life with propriety and dignity. ”

“ All the good that God meant for mankind, "all the joys of sense, all the pleasures of reason, lie in three words,—health, peace, and competence." ”

“ And the unutterable,—feeling or sensation,—far from being the highest truth, is the most unimportant and untrue. If I say 'The individual,' 'This individual,' 'here,' 'now,' all these are universal terms. Everything and anything is an individual, a 'this,' and if it be sensible, is here and now. ”

“ All the great things of humanity have been accomplished in the name of absolute principles. ”

“ To reorganise that part of us which is independent of bodily sustenance and health, which lives on spiritual commodities—the part of us including ambition, ideal, sympathy, and all that I have called ideas? ”

“ All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits,—practical, emotional, and intellectual,—systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be. ”

“ Our very theory insists that your internal meanings, your ideas viewed as internally significant, your selections and expressions, are typical instances of facts, and of precisely the facts of whose unity the world consists. ”

“ Beneath all this gloss of the world—this cold conventional aspect, which all more or less present, and which the business of life renders necessary—there resides for certain a fountain of goodness, pure in its inner depths as the lymph rock-distilled, and ready on every proper occasion to well out in the exercise of the noblest duties. ”

“ Let us resume our reflections upon men, their characters, their manners, in a word, our reflections upon the world. They may help you to form yourself, and to know others; a knowledge very useful at all ages, very rare at yours. ”

“ What value should we put upon their praises? What should we think of their sincerity? Yet, comparing small things to great, such is the conduct of mankind in general, in reference to the Universe and its Cause. ”

“ This negative character of the universal judgments holds true of them, as we have said, just in so far as you sunder the external and the internal meanings, and just in so far as you view the Real as the Beyond, and as merely the Beyond. If you turn your attention once more to the realm of the ideas viewed as internal meanings, you see, indeed, that they are constantly becoming enriched, in their inner life, by all this process. ”

“ The inspirations or revelations of the common sense, in and through which the Almighty Power gives us an understanding of the life and world in which we find ourselves, inspirations in which all men are believed more or less to participate, require us to distinguish the solid and extended pin, as something public or outward, in contrast to the private feeling of pain, of which no one except the person who feels it is conscious. ”

“ Going forth into the bareness and darkness of this unwalled world of high contemplation, you there find stored for you, and at last made real, all the highest values, all the dearest and noblest experiences of the world of growth and change. ”

“ There are facts on which men of the world superciliously smile, which are worth all their trade and politics; which drive young men into gardens and solitary places, and cause extravagant gestures, starts, distortions of the countenance, and passionate exclamations; sentiments, which find no aliment or language for themselves on the wharves, in court, or market, but which are soothed by silence, by darkness, by the pale stars, and the presence of nature. ”

“ The element of power, in all the expressions of such a mind, will fluctuate; but every one of its expressions will be sincere and in a greater or less degree will be vital with a universal and permanent significance. ”

“ Steadiness of purpose under adverse or confusing circumstances is called persistence, courage, loyalty, or zeal, with {96} differences of meaning that reflect the nature either of the purpose or the circumstances. ”

“ Of all these wider, more potential selves, the potential social Me is the most interesting, by reason of certain apparent paradoxes to which it leads in conduct, and by reason of its connection with our moral and religious life. ”

“ But when we take a survey of the more sublime parts of the human frame; when we behold man's internal make and structure; his mental faculties; his social propensions, and those active powers which set all in motion—the passions,—what an illustrious display of consummate wisdom is presented to our admiring view! ”

“ "And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them ..." ”