Event

“ Say not "a small event!" Why "small"?
Costs it more pain that this, ye call
A "great event," should come to pass,
Than that? Untwine me from the mass
Of deeds which make up life, one deed
Power shall fall short in or exceed! ”

“ It is its business in short in such a case to discover the mere ideal core and significance of an event, action, or a national type, a famous historical personality, and as decisively to brush aside aspects of contingency, everything in fact purely incidental or indifferent, which plays round such types or individuals, and stands to them in a purely relative connection. ”

“ It reigns in the centre of every event; and every event is fixed in its centre; and all that comes and all that goes passes from end to end of our little life without moving by a hair’s breadth around its motionless pivot. ”

“ We know indeed that every event, however insignificant, implies a change, however slight, in the material constitution of the universe, so that the whole history of the world is, in a sense, engraved upon its face, though our eyes are too dim to read the scroll. ”

“ The expression "human events" I submit to the taste of the cultivated reader. Affairs, may be human or inhuman; divine or diabolical. An "event" may be great or small, &c. But can humanity or inhumanity be predicated of "events?" To be sure, human beings are actors frequently, in the scenes which when completed we call "events." Does that fact however, make them human? A pestilence—famine—the rise and fall of empires and wars are events. ”

“ But now every event has a meaning; they have their own estimate of whatever happens to them; they are mindful of times and seasons, and compare the present with the past; and the world, no longer dull, monotonous, unprofitable, and hopeless, is a various and complicated drama, with parts and an object, and an awful moral. ”

“ To men who make history, however, while floating round in that vortex, and tending onward, amid all their struggles, to the one inevitable doom, how light and easy is the transition, how imperceptible the diminution of the circle, as onward, onward they are carried--how rapid, especially in times of great activity, is the passage of event into event. ”

“ Every step in each story is an event. There is no time spent in explanation, description, or telling how people felt; the stories tell what people did, and what they said. And the events are the links of a sequence of the closest kind; in point of time and of cause they follow as immediately as it is possible for events to follow. ”

“ In the development of time into causation, persistence becomes state and change becomes event. In the development of judgment into conception, consciousness becomes recollection and choice becomes inference. ”

“ In the life of any individual, association, or nation, there will probably be one or more occurrences which may be considered as success or failure according to the dramatic features of the event and the ultimate results. ”

“ The account of the event itself demands spirited narrative and description that portrays not only the scenes but the spirit of the occasion. The contrast between the emotions of the victors and those of the vanquished may be used to good advantage. ”

“ But the soul contains the event that shall befall it, for the event is only the actualization of its thoughts; and what we pray to ourselves for is always granted. ”

“ In vain, therefore, should we pretend to determine any single event, or infer any cause or effect, without the assistance of observation and experience. ”

“ Experience speedily taught them that the shifting scenes of the world's stage have a permanent background; that there is order amidst the seeming confusion, and that many events take place according to unchanging rules. ”

“ It expresses the ‘great refusal’ which is its primary characteristic. An event is decisive in proportion to the importance (for it) of its untrue propositions: their relevance to the event cannot be dissociated from what the event is in itself by way of achievement. These transcendent entities have been termed ‘universals.’ I prefer to use the term ‘eternal objects,’ in order to disengage myself from presuppositions which cling to the former term owing to its prolonged philosophical history. ”

“ The great event by which it is distinguished, and by which it will forever be distinguished from all other days of the year, has justly claimed thoughtful attention among statesmen and social reformers throughout the world. ”

“ Will you say, that when one event precedes another, the one which comes first is the effect, and the one which follows afterwards is the cause? This is not the way in which men reason on the ordinary affairs of life ”

“ Particular accounts have to do with those small happenings that seem to come by chance, those events that form, as it were, complete and detachable bits of life. That is to say, each relation is of something that has taken place or been witnessed in a comparatively short time—an incident of a trip downtown, a characteristic action of a great man, an important political event, an adventure, a brief series of pleasures. ”

“ Expect a little, compare future and times past with the present, see the event, and comfort thyself with it. It is as well to be discerned in commonwealths, cities, families, as in private men's estates. ”

“ The history of a minute—why, it would give a bird's-eye view of every possible variety in human existence. Wonderful the many events that are happening together—life and death—joy and sorrow; the great and the mean; the common and the rare; good and evil ”

“ We would like to have life "turn out"—but it doesn't—it doesn't. Each event is the beginning of a whole new genealogy of events. In boyhood I remember asking after every story I heard: "What happened next?" ”

“ In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself. ”

“ An event of colossal and overwhelming significance may happen all at once, but the words which describe it have to come one by one in a long chain. ”

“ The form of the whole is in such examples narrative, inasmuch as it is the progressive advance of a situation or event, as among other instances, a particular direction in the fate of a nation, which is communicated. ”

“ For experience has taught us, at least, how endless and how momentous is the line of events, not only for ourselves but also for a growing multitude of others, that we set in motion with each choice of the forking road. ”

“ We notice, at any rate, that the diarist’s remarks need considerable re-arrangement to make them really narrative.
Life Is Chronological, Art Is Logical.––Yet it is just in this way that commonly event succeeds event in the daily life of every one. ”

“ Remember what I have so often told you, that it is not the events of life—its outward circumstances that are important, but the effect they have on our characters. The cloudy and the bright day alike soon pass away. ”

“ The events of to-day take on swollen and gigantic forms, while the events of yesterday and the day before shrink into almost indistinguishable shapes on the dim horizon. It spoils one's perspective and sense of values. ”

“ For it trenches on paradox, surely, that the one absolutely certain event in every human career is also the most unexplored and practically incredible.—An everyday occurrence, a commonplace, concerning which there remains nothing new, nothing original, to be written, sung or said ”

“ It was on the same sunny afternoon, however, that a curious incident occurred which was responsible for altering the steady prosaic course of our lives. The most trifling incidents change the current of a life, and the smallest events are sufficient to alter history altogether. ”

“ Time rolled on, and the majestic order of nature, uninterrupted in its harmonious course, finely contrasted the rapid vicissitudes of human events, and the countless changes in human institutions! In the short space of twenty years, the mighty had fallen, and the lowly were elevated ”

“ In like manner, great events attract our attention and interest our minds, because of their relations—because of the higher qualities of mind which, perhaps, gave them birth, and the striking and lasting changes which grow out of them. ”

“ Those touching them are supposed to show the events that are happening at the present moment, those far from them are in the past, or the future, depending whether they are above or below the two important ones. ”

“ The events, the incidents, of the day occur in a natural order: one follows another. The days of the week with their respective incidents follow in natural sequence. A full recognition of this fact is of far greater help to the memory than [731] one would believe on first thought. ”

“ A.—Because events are like a procession; they pass a few at a time and cast a shadow on subjective minds, and those which have passed before the waking mind are felt by other minds also and necessarily make a more lasting impression on the subjective mind. ”

“ It is to study the succession of events, not as separate units, but as links of one vast chain, on every one of which is inscribed a phrase discoursing of the progress of the human race, and showing the growth of man in the complex, from infancy to adolescence. ”

“ Fasts, feasts, flowers, sweetmeats, lights, candles, little journeys, visits, calls, dances, prayers, responses, wails, cries of exultation, shouts of triumph—"Rejoicing of the Law"—these prevented monotony, stagnation and introspection. ”

“ Events which strike us with astonishment in their record, whether they are real or imaginary, acquire much of their importance from our knowledge of the antecedent circumstances and present condition of the actors. ”

“ Events germinate and unfold. They have a past which is connected with their present, and we feel a well-justified confidence that a future is appointed which will be similarly connected with the present and the past. ”

“ The circumstance of their actual occurrence, and the fact that the present reality diminishes, from many causes, our surprise at events, tend to make us think lightly of what is going on around us. And, besides this, we ordinarily see only the surface of society. ”

“ In spite of their incessant and wily manoeuvers we have steadily gained ground, now more slowly and then more rapidly.
The progress of our cause has sometimes received a powerful impulse from events which startled the popular conscience. ”

“ I am aware that a little activity of imagination, and a slight exercise of metaphysical ingenuity, may amuse us, by showing how the chain of circumstances is so linked together, that the smallest skirmish, or the slightest occurrence of any kind, that ever occurred, may be said to have been essential, in its actual termination, to the whole order of subsequent events. ”

“ Throughout these tales the plan has been to present a picture of ordinary life, with its small daily events, its pleasures, and its trials, so as to draw out its capabilities of being turned to the best account. ”

“ The chronological arrangement of events, for example, may or may not be the arrangement which most surely brings the truth of the narrative to light; and the best arrangement is always that which displays, not the facts themselves, but the subtle and else invisible forces that lurk in the events and in the minds of men,—forces for which events serve only as lasting and dramatic words of utterance. ”

“ It will supply the great mass of the public, who are at present almost necessarily in the dark as to the past world and its destinies, with a complete picture of all the great events relating to the world and to man, from the earliest dawn of history down to the present time ”