Concavity

“ A conviction has come to my mind that a higher guidance attends me and that it will direct everything for the best; that I have nothing to do but to yield myself up to its inspiration so long as I keep my eye firmly directed to the Star of Bethlehem which led me hither—and I cannot turn my eye from that—the desire to find the truth. ”

“ Let the wind blow how it may, there is but one thing to attend to, one thing to ask about, namely, whether he steer according to the compass, which, in this case, is the conscience or conscientious conviction. ”

“ If this be law, with conscience, show me your opinion, I pray you." “Forsooth, my lord,” quoth he, “there is some conscience in this case; but having regard to the king’s high power, and to be employed to a better use and purpose, it may the better be suffered with conscience; who is sufficient to make recompense to the church of York with double the value.” “That I know well,” quoth my lord, “but here is no such condition neither promised nor agreed, but only a bare and simple departure with another’s right for ever. ”

“ SETTER. Ha! what art who thus maliciously hast awakened me from my dream of glory? Speak, thou vile disturber—
LUCY. Of thy most vile cogitations—thou poor, conceited wretch, how wert thou valuing thyself upon thy master’s employment? For he’s the head pimp to Mr. Bellmour.
SETTER. Good words, damsel, or I shall—But how dost thou know my master or me?
LUCY. Yes; I know both master and man to be—
SETTER. To be men, perhaps; nay, faith, like enough: I often march in the rear of my master, and enter the breaches which he has made. ”

“ MASK. Lucky! Fortune is your own, and ’tis her interest so to be. By heaven I believe you can control her power, and she fears it: though chance brought my lord, ’twas your own art that turned it to advantage.
LADY TOUCH. ’Tis true it might have been my ruin. But yonder’s my lord. I believe he’s coming to find you: I’ll not be seen.
SCENE II. MASKWELL alone.
MASK. So; I durst not own my introducing my lord, though it succeeded well for her, for she would have suspected a design which I should have been puzzled to excuse. My lord is thoughtful. I’ll be so too ”

“ Instead of the mind-paralyzing worship of the past and the bondage of the present to that which is written, the conviction took hold on men that there was no limit to what they might know concerning their nature and destiny and no limit to that destiny. ”

“ She hath saved mine, mine most sinful, the monk interrupted her sternly; and dost thou think I 'll lose it now to thee? Get thee gone, with thy strange beliefs and blasphemies!
She got to her feet very slow, and stepped down the bank to the edge of the burn; so, standing close at his knee, she spoke once again:—
In the city where the wall is jasper and the gates are twelve pearls, will there be any villeins to labour while other men feast? ”

“ BELL. Well, in this fanatic father’s habit will I confess Lætitia.
SETTER. Rather prepare her for confession, sir, by helping her to sin.
BELL. Be at your master’s lodging in the evening; I shall use the robes.
SCENE V.
Setter alone.
SETTER. I shall, sir. I wonder to which of these two gentlemen I do most properly appertain: the one uses me as his attendant; the other (being the better acquainted with my parts) employs me as a pimp; why, that’s much the more honourable employment—by all means. I follow one as my master, the other follows me as his conductor. ”

“ Alas! humanity is feeble, heav’n knows! very feeble, and unable to support itself.
MEL. Where am I? is it day? and am I awake? Madam—
LADY PLYANT. And nobody knows how circumstances may happen together. To my thinking, now I could resist the strongest temptation. But yet I know, ’tis impossible for me to know whether I could or not; there’s no certainty in the things of this life.
MEL. Madam, pray give me leave to ask you one question.
LADY PLYANT. O Lord, ask me the question; I’ll swear I’ll refuse it, I swear I’ll deny it—therefore don’t ask me; nay, you shan’t ask me, I swear I’ll deny it. ”

“ It was indeed truth so cunningly intermingled with Fiction, that it required no less Wit and Presence of Mind than she was endowed with so to acquit her self on the suddain. She had entrusted her self indeed with a Fellow who proved a Villain, to conduct her to a Monastery; but one which was in the Town, and where she intended only to lie concealed for his sake; as the Reader shall understand ere long: For we have another Discovery to make to him, if he have not found it out of himself already. ”

“ God asks, first, a perfect consecration; second, a perfect faith, and third, a perfect love. This idea of perfect consecration is in the realm of human possibilities. Let me look at it. Does anybody doubt that a man may be perfectly consecrated to his business? Don’t we know men that are lost, that are really dying, wrecking body, soul, and spirit, all that they have, in business; business in the morning, noon, and night, so driven with business that they are not acquainted with their own children? ”

“ Yet the essence or nature of this spirit of piety which we would analyse, consists in consciousness of the reality of the object of its yearning or devotion. Not altogether through induction or deduction, but with an irrational immediacy of conviction, it feels and knows its object. In place of the knowledge which is mediated through rational processes, is substituted a conviction upheld by yearning, love’s conviction indeed, of the reality and presence of that which is all the greater and more worthy because it baffles reason. ”

“ How am I to be strung up like that kind of thing—and live without means?"
"Tsz-lu," said the Master, "you have heard of the six words with their six obfuscations?"
"No," said he, "not so far."
"Sit down, and I will tell you them. They are these six virtues, cared for without care for any study about them:—philanthropy, wisdom, faithfulness, straightforwardness, courage, firmness. And the six obfuscations resulting from not liking to learn about them are, respectively, these:—fatuity, mental dissipation, mischievousness, perversity, insubordination, impetuosity." ”

“ There is a burden on you that you can neither shake off nor bear as you wish. I know the cause of your trouble, and I hope you will not find fault with me if I help you to recover from that disagreeable mental condition. You have heard in the confessional the history of many great sins, but I know that this is not what troubles you. You are all old enough in the confessional to know the miseries of poor human nature. ”

“ I have been much perplexed for some days, in consequence of a growing conviction—which has indeed been deepening for some weeks—that we are each of us conscious that we have made a mistake in becoming engaged. I believe you have this conviction, as I am obliged to confess I have. Now it is infinitely better that we face it at once. ”

“ As far back as I can remember, I find that my dominant faculty, the one that has been present in every crisis of my life, great or small, and which is present to-day, has been the faculty, I mean the power and the need of duplication. There have always been in me, as it were, two distinct persons; one who went, came, acted, felt, and another who looked at the first go, come, act, and feel with an impassable curiosity. ”

“ We ought to engage what I have ventured in this society to call the "emotion of conviction," the caprices of which are so extravagant and so dangerous, much more seriously on the side of the uniformity of Nature than we have ever hitherto done. We should all try to distinguish more carefully than we do between possibility, probability, and certainty. ”

“ What you lose by unfaithful wrapping of your convictions in a napkin and burying them in the ground is the joyful use of the convictions, the deeper hold of the truth by which you live, and before which you bow, and the true fellowship with the Master whom you acknowledge and confess. ”

“ The Master said, Wisdom delights in water; love delights in hills. Wisdom is stirring; love is quiet. Wisdom is merry; love grows old.
22. The Master said, By one revolution Ch'i might grow to be Lu; by one revolution Lu might reach the Way.
23. The Master said, A drinking horn that is no horn! What a horn! What a drinking horn!
24. Tsai Wo [61] said, If a man of love were told that a man is in a well, would he go in after him?
The Master said, Why should he? A gentleman might be got to the well, but not trapped into it, He may be cheated, but not fooled. ”

“ If you call me a degraded man, because my soul, my mind and my heart were, as your own are to-day, plunged into the deep waters of iniquity which flow from the confessional, I confess 'Guilty!' I was degraded and polluted by the confessional just as you and all the priests of Rome are. ”

“ You are sadly mistaken, in a false and dangerous security. You are perhaps, although unawares, on the very brink of a precipice, where so many have fallen through their blind confidence in their own strength or their confessor's prudence and sanctity. ”

“ A distinction is here made between asking, seeking, and knocking; also between what is given, what is found, and what is opened; from which distinction it would appear, that asking has relation to the desire of saving good, or love and charity in the will; seeking has relation to the desire of saving knowledge, or truth in the understanding; and knocking has relation to the communication and conjunction of both with their Divine Source, Jesus Christ. ”

“ How is it possible that conviction can find its way to our hearts, when we hear the absurd language, and witness the acts of iniquity, of the greatest number of those whose business it is to preach to us? ”

“ To any one unaccustomed to these efforts, the effect produced is almost miraculous: conviction steals in from so many sources, that the mind, like a city assaulted on every side, is captured almost at once. ”

“ I still persist in the conviction I have so frequently expressed, the conviction that the fundamental traits of the life of the soul have undergone very trivial modifications among civilized nations in all times and ages, but will endeavor to explain the contrary opinion, held by my opponents, by calling attention to the circumstance, that the expression of these emotions show considerable variations among different peoples, and at different epochs. ”

“ To find enjoyment in extravagant pleasures; to find enjoyment in idleness and sauntering; to find enjoyment in the pleasures of feasting:— these are injurious.' CHAP. VI. Confucius said, 'There are three errors to which they who stand in the presence of a man of virtue and station are liable. They may speak when it does not come to them to speak;— this is called rashness. They may not speak when it comes to them to speak;— this is called concealment. ”

“ Every such habit inheres immediately in some operative faculty, as science in the intellect, or justice in the will. All natural habits are operative. There is, however, as we know from Divine Revelation, an “entitative” habit, a habitus entitativus, which affects the substance itself of the human soul, ennobling its natural mode of being and so perfecting it as to raise it to a higher or supernatural plane of being, to an order of existence altogether undue to its nature: the supernaturally infused habit of sanctifying grace.332.Eth. ”

“ Confucius said. Men that wait upon lords fall into three mistakes. To speak before the time has come is rashness. Not to speak when the time has come is secrecy. To speak heedless of looks is blindness.
7. Confucius said, A gentleman has three things to guard against.
In the days of thy youth, ere thy strength is steady, beware of lust. When manhood is reached, in the fulness of strength, beware of strife. ”

“ Spencer or any one else deny that, whatever sanction the human and relative conception of "power" draws from the inner certainties of our own sensations, that same, or a still higher, sanction can also be claimed for the conception of an infinite and eternal "Wisdom"? ”

“ Conviction produces emotional tension. Study the pictures of Theodore Roosevelt and of Billy Sunday in action—action is the word. Note the tension of their jaw muscles, the taut lines of sinews in their entire bodies when reaching a climax of force. Moral and physical force are alike in being both preceded and accompanied by in-tens-ity—tension—tightness of the cords of power.
It is this tautness of the bow-string, this knotting of the muscles, this contraction before the spring, that makes an audience feel—almost see—the reserve power in a speaker. ”

“ But O God, as we pray for tolerance, we pray too that we may be men of conviction. Give to us an open mind, but give us also the strength to stand for our convictions even if it take a Calvary Cross to win them. ”

“ Wonder if our own highest things have not grown up out of equally simple things. The compulsion first—then the sense of duty become habit, automatic, the conviction expanding into knowledge of ethical habit,—then the habit creating conviction,—then relations,—then the capacity for general ideas. ”

“ The Master said to him, "Self-control, and a habit of falling back upon propriety, virtually effect it. Let these conditions be fulfilled for one day, and every one round will betake himself to the duty. Is it to begin in one's self, or think you, indeed! it is to begin in others?" ”