Impact

“ The sphere of golden light seemed to pulse, and a tiny ruby flame appeared within it, that waxed and waned, and as it waxed, there shot through each of those watching beings a feeling of rushing, exhilarating power, the very vital force of well-being. ”

“ What a difficult thing it would be to sit down and try to enumerate the different influences by which our lives have been affected—influences of other lives, of art, of nature, of place and circumstance,—of beautiful sights passing before our eyes, or painful ones: seasons following in their course—hills rising on our horizons—scenes of ruin and desolation—crowded thoroughfares—sounds in our ears, jarring or harmonious—the voices of friends, calling, warning, encouraging—of preachers preaching—of people in the street below, complaining, and asking our pity! ”

“ When we consider the chain of causes and effects in the material world, independent of purpose, design, or thought, we find a train of incidents in succession, without beginning, middle, or end. Every thing that happens is both a cause and an effect: it is the effect of something that goes before, and the cause of one or many things that follow. ”

“ Whether outlining with bold pencil strokes or working up the picture from the canvas of environment with subtlest brush touches, how can one hope to convey the idea of a life such as this, gathered out of its past, confirmed for its great future, girded with purpose and panoplied for resistance? ”

“ Thus, every act we do or word we utter, as well as every act we witness or word we hear, carries with it an influence which extends over, and gives a colour, not only to the whole of our future life, but makes itself felt upon the whole frame of society. We may not, and indeed cannot, possibly, trace the influence working itself into action in its various ramifications amongst our children, our friends, or associates ”

“ The very idea of such a stupendous and miraculous event, involving the hopes and fears, the rewards and punishments, the eternal peace or endless misery of the whole human race, is sufficiently astounding and overwhelming in itself; but when heightened by the most artful and gorgeous imitation that human ingenuity could invent or effect, the impression is beyond description or even conception! ”

“ Was it that the struggle of things to survive produced as a sort of necessary by-product these intense preferences and appreciations, or was it that some mystical outer thing, some great force, drove life beautyward, even in spite of expediency, regardless of survival value and all the manifest discretions of life? ”

“ For our impulses, whether they make for life or death are the same impulses—the difference in their result springing from a difference in their direction, and in the conditions under which they operate. ”

“ The various springs from which human action flows, the various types which human crises produce, the virtues and the vices which great historic conflicts heat into activity—all these features of social motion, never jointly reproduced in works of history, are here drawn in vivid colors and present a historic canvas that is prime in the domain of literature. ”

“ They who visit it stand and survey the now silent and solitary scene, and derive from the influence and spirit of the spot new strength and energy to meet the great difficulties and dangers of life which they themselves have to encounter. ”

“ Other elements of that force are the physical needs; the push and play of passions ingrained in human nature; the inherited bias; the strength of habits formed before childhood had begun to reflect,—the thousand forces which blend with reason and choice to make up our destiny. ”

“ The rise, the long, slow upward struggle of the soul of man was as destined and inevitable as its fall; all human achievement, material or spiritual, was founded in the baseness of mire and clay—and rose towering above its foundations. ”

“ Tonight, tomorrow, may begin the fierce blasts that will sweep away the last vestige of what was strength, or pride, or beauty, or power, or understanding. Even now the winds of disaster may be whining under your door. A good body is something, a brain is more. ”

“ We knew before the Change, the meanest knew, by glowing moments in ourselves and others, by histories and music and beautiful things, by heroic instances and splendid stories, how fine mankind could be, how fine almost any human being could upon occasion be ”

“ Conclusion Recapitulation—The various steps in the study presented in propositional form—The rôle of catastrophe direct and indirect. (a) Directly prepares the ground-work for change by: (1) weakening social immobility; (2) producing fluidity of custom; (3) enhancing environal favorability for change— (b) Indirectly sets in motion factors determining the nature of the change such as: (1) the release of spirit and morale; (2) the play of imitation; (3) the stimulus of leaders and lookers-on; (4) the socialization of institutions. ”

“ This look of hers, which you have caught on your canvases, and all the other great beacon-lights of human expression, stand of course for the inner energies of our lives, the leading forces of our characters. But, as ages pass, human life changes ”

“ If there is nothing shifting or fitful or simply changing about Him, there is everywhere energy and expansion, thought and emotion, effort and experience, joy and sorrow, loneliness and conflict, interior trial and triumph, exterior defeat and supplantation: particular affections, particular humiliations, homely labour, a homely heroism, greatness throughout in littleness. ”

“ Still others meditate head in hand or stare in fixed absorption at Philosophers’ targets fixed on posts at different points in the grounds. A general air of hope, sequacity, peace, content, well-being, ease, and other forms of human satisfaction, pervades each and every section of the field. ”

“ It is by small and apparently trivial matters that the main issues of life are determined. A fall of rain, the plucking of a flower, the accidental turning to the right or the left--any one of these trifling incidents is sufficient to stamp the future with an indelible impress. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The reins are held by Hope, her eyes toward heaven. Industry, Memory, and Experience sit behind, giving out to the hungry crowd the means of honorable plenty in the form of flails, axes, squares, and hammers. ”

“ A word—a thought—an unforeseen emotion—an event of paltriest dimensions in itself—may be the germ of an influence wide as a continent, and lasting as a thousand years—may, in fact, change the current and complexion of a person's social history and character, and lead to consequences which shall be durable as eternity. ”

“ All will, whether human or non-human, invariably acts in the direction of the strongest motive, just as a stone or a river invariably moves, if it moves at all, in the direction of the strongest tendency or force. ”

“ He sees all things evolving from other things, and resolving into other things—a constant action and reaction; inflow and outflow; building up and tearing down; creation and destruction; birth, growth and death. ”

“ Under [Pg 132] this heading will be found the large group of articles that answer the question why?, as for example, "Why the Quebec Bridge Collapsed," "Causes of the Strike among the Garment Workers," "Popular Opinion as Affecting Government Action," and other such subjects. In the following analysis of the relation existing between human action as result, and impulse and desire as causes, you will find such an informal presentation of material.
All human activity springs from two sources: impulse and desire. The part played by desire has always been sufficiently recognized. ”

“ This intermittent trickle of messages, this whispering of a record needle in the stillness of the mountain slopes, is the first warning of such a change in human conditions as mankind has scarcely imagined heretofore. ”

“ We survey the scene that moves around, with a gaze no longer distracted by every hope that flutters by; and it is therefore that we find ourselves more calculated than before for the graver occupations of our race. ”

“ Both are subject to storm and disaster, both subject to the influence of strength, truth, beauty. Nature is active under the influence of power: man, because of the spirit relationship, is more active and elevated under influence of the same Power. ”

“ The process by which principles are discovered and appropriated is other than that by which, in practice, they are applied; and our most sacred and disinterested convictions ought to take shape in the tranquil regions of the air, above the tumult and the tempest of active life. ”

“ Then, all true life being condensed into the main growth, instead of being so much scattered in tendrils, offshoots and flower-bunches, the effect would be more grand and simple; nor should we be any loser as to the spirit ”

“ May we not welcome, as at least a step in the right direction, a change in our conventional habits, which may extend, though in ever so small a degree, the region of common thoughts and aims, common hopes and disappointments, common joys and common sorrows? ”

“ In what manner they are affected by the forces of nature—its influences of gentleness and peace or its vast pageants of beauty and terror—those words denote; and also those words indicate the action, upon their responsive spirits, of the passions that agitate the human heart. ”

“ The important influence which this power of endurance or self-control will have upon your later life, you can not as yet fully estimate, though you may perhaps have some idea of it. Important, indeed, will its influence prove in the family circle, in your intercourse with your neighbors, in the community, in business, and in public life when you are called upon to take an active share in political affairs. ”

“ This law of growth, progress, evolution, unfoldment, by gradual and ever ascending stages, is absolute in every department of life, and in every human accomplishment, and where it is ignored, total failure will result. ”

“ If, on the contrary, it is a question of a complex state, such as those impressions of profound joy or sorrow which lay hold of us entirely, invading and overwhelming us, what we call their intensity expresses only the confused feeling of a qualitative progress, and increasing wealth. ”

“ Physical influences thus following one another, and bearing to each other the inter-relation of cause and effect, stand in their totality to the whole organic world as causes, it representing the effect, and the order of succession existing among them is perpetuated or embodied in it. ”

“ We see the effects of the understanding alone, not the understanding itself, and however various a burning city, cast iron, a burn, and steaming water may be, we recognize that in spite of the difference of effect, the same fire has brought about all these results. ”

“ All the visible manifestations of human life, then, are effects; and as such, although they may possess a reflex action, they can never be causes, but must remain forever what they are—dead effects, galvanized into life by an enduring and profound cause. ”

“ By farther degrees we learn such a use of the words cause and effect as to call nothing a cause, whose cause, or preceding circumstance, we can see, denominating all such things mere effects, all others causes. ”

“ The first reflection, that naturally arises, is upon the inequality of the effect to the cause. Here are vast sums expended, many hands, and some heads, employed, from day to day, and from month to month; and the whole nation is filled with expectations, by delineations and narratives. ”

“ In contrast to this view, there is the allocentric outlook which is marked by an 'open encounter of the total person with the world.' Growth, spontaneity and expression are the goals of such an existence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Clearly only the contact, or immediate proximity of the two occurrences. If any sequence could in fact be more wonderful than another, it should rather seem to be for the consequent to impart grandeur to the precedent—the effect to the cause,—than for the cause to impart grandeur to the effect. ”

“ It is enduring, a course of action, a process including memory, observation and foresight, a pressure forward, a glance backward and a look outward. It is of moral moment because it marks a transition in the direction of breadth and clarity of action or in that of triviality and confusion. Progress is present reconstruction adding fullness and distinctness of meaning, and retrogression is a present slipping away of significance, determinations, grasp. ”

“ But amongst all these changes one is almost universally overlooked, and that the most characteristic, the most remarkable, and the most important: the face of civilisation has come to be illumined by hope. ”

“ Each impulse has its constitutional ministry of thought and knowledge and reflection, through which possible conflicts of impulses are foreseen, and temporary impulses are controlled by the unifying impulse which may be called wisdom. ”

“ As it is experience only that discovers these connections between natural causes and their effects; without inquiring further, we attribute to the cause some vague and indistinct notion of power or virtue to produce the effect. ”