Insignificance

“ Leaving us, in fact, not even the ‘shadow of a shade’ of a social or civil existence! We are thus reduced to a condition of insignificance, in relation to the active affairs of life and the world, that we have determined to be, both incongruous and insufferable. ”

“ Such, then, being your precarious situation, who could wonder that you should put a negative on any measure which must annihilate your power, deprive you of your emoluments, and at once reduce you to that state of insignificance for which God and nature designed you. ”

“ Furthermore, if one observes the nature of things he perceives, whether he will or no, that not all are embraced in a single degree of dignity; but that certain among them are distinguished by inequality of degree. ”

“ Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power—how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference? ”

“ How poor the scene around, how tame one's own existence, how meagre and faint every power, with these beings in my mind! Often I must cast them quite aside in order to grow in my small way, and not sink into despair. ”

“ What merits, either stifled or neglected, become lost to the public, and a burden to their possessors! What falsehood, and coldness, and levity, and ingratitude, and forgetfulness, abound in the relations and feelings of men! Life is so short, and yet so agitated—sometimes so burdensome, and sometimes so empty! ”

“ Now the truth is, that the difference between a limited and imperfect attribute of character and one that is boundless—power, for example—is more than a difference of degree. It is a difference in kind; for while in both cases we conceive of a personal capacity to act and a will to guide the act, in the one case we are thinking of that which is inferior, limited, and feeble, and in the other case we are thinking of that which knows no limitations and is absolutely inexhaustible. ”

“ In truth they were bound together by many a strong tie, and above all by one of a polemical kind, namely, by the aversion for the monotony that had preceded them, and by the struggle against merely dogmatic rules. Unbending uniformity is death! Let us be various and individual as life itself is. ”

“ Distinction may be joined with imperfection, as ignorance, or forgetfulness; and so it is in men:—and if this be called separation by a metaphor from bodies, then the conclusion would be that in the Supreme Mind there is distinction without imperfection; and then the question is, whence comes plurality of Persons? ”

“ In short, sir, he is utterly without conscience, without humanity, without principle. Gain is his first object, his last object, his sole object; and if he ever did any good, it was simply incidental. ”

“ Sufficiency shuts us in but till the man of the world—never prefigured, as I say, only welcomed on the spot—appears; when we see at once how much we have wanted him. When we fail of that acknowledgment, that sense as of a tension, an anxiety or an indigence relieved, it is of course but that the extraordinary set of circumstances, or above all the extraordinary time of life I speak of, has indeed intervened. ”

“ The vast disparity among men in respect to capacity compels us, if we wish to ascribe justice to Nature or to God, to admit reïncarnation and to trace the origin of the disparity back to the past lives of the Ego. ”

“ And at once, with astounding impudence, he launches into a train of remark the purport of which is that everything down below is at sixes and sevens, and that in his opinion human nature has turned out a failure. ”

“ The world, my world, is generously and munificently lax, and though the limits of respectable endurance may be as hard to find as the 'fourth dimension of space', or the authenticity of the 'Book of Jasher', still for decency's sake we submit there are limits of decorum ”

“ Yet those who make the most pretensions in this topsy-turvy of a world regard it as a disgrace to have been obscure and ignorant, and pride themselves upon their persistence in their own kind of obscurity and ignorance! ”

“ Instead, then, of attempting to imagine a world in which there should be no uniformities, let us suppose one in which none of the uniformities should have reference to characters interesting or important to us. ”

“ Those thousand vexations which come upon us through the unreasonableness, the carelessness, the various constitutional failings, or ill-adaptedness of others to our peculiarities of character, form a very large item of the disquietudes of life ”

“ Too much reserve or too little; a free and luminous look; the mysterious lowering of eyelids,—all betray, at that sudden moment, the sentiment which is the most difficult of all to hide; for real indifference has something so radically cold about it that it can never be simulated. ”

“ These excesses will always exist; they are inherent in the human constitution, resulting from the very nature of man; they are an inevitable sequence of his physical structure, and his intellectual life. ”

“ Of our necessities, our failures, our endeavours and our rewards in these great matters, it is not possible to speak, for they are among the sacred things that dwell in silence. But there are, you may say, certain condiments in life which can be spoken of. ”

“ But that the spirit can look with other than indifference, if not loathing, on the perishing exuviæ of its chrysalis existence, which, to its retrospective gaze, presents little other than a tasking house of base necessities, a chained prison of cruel disappointments, even to our human reason, clogged as it is with bars and contradictions, appears hardly to admit the opportunity of question, and of consequence to that spirit its disposition can but be a matter of indifference. ”

“ He had entered by then the broad, human path of inconsistencies. ”

“ Sorely as I have struggled, I have yet to encounter that common myth of weak men, an insurmountable barrier. The imperfection of our lives— what is it but the imperfection of our planning and doing? Shattered ideals—what hand shatters them but one's own? ”

“ When they attempt to describe him, lost in the mists of their own ignorance, they grow more and more vague until the Supreme Being melts into a mere essence, or nonentity, boundless and limitless, because possessing no qualities that can be limited, and no attributes that can be defined. ”

“ Could blind chance constitute order and decorum, and consequently a providence? That wisdom, order, and design should be the production of nonentity, or of chaos, confusion, and old night, is too absurd to deserve a serious confutation, for it supposeth that there may be effects without a cause, viz.: produced by nonentity, or that chaos and confusion could produce the effects of power, wisdom, and goodness. Such absurdities as these we must assent to, or subscribe to the doctrine of a self-existent and providential being. ”

“ Perhaps an existence like his, always solitary, reduced to the satisfaction of mere needs, deprived of money and all pleasures in youth, may explain to physiologists and thinkers the clownish expression of the face, the feebleness of mind, the vacant silliness of the man. ”

“ Suffering then assumes the proportions of the unknown, which is certainly the infinite of the soul. ”

“ Inconsistency is shown by words without deeds, which Scientific consistency are like clouds without rain. If our words fail to express our deeds, God will redeem that weakness, and out of the mouth of babes He will perfect praise. ”

“ For in proportion as the body suffers ten thousand things, in the like proportion hath the soul goodlier hopes and becometh brighter, like gold refined in the fire more and more. And see how he brings to nothing the sorrows of this present life. ”

“ The perplexity, confusion, and uneasiness, which we labour under in abstruse inquiries, philosophical, moral, and religious, ought, perhaps, to be referred to this head. Also the secondary perplexity which arises from our being subject to this perplexity, confusion, and uneasiness. ”

“ But then, suffering unreasonableness, — a merely fragmentary mood of finite life, — if taken by itself, asks no very definite questions. For definite questions are reasonable, and imply successful inner deeds. ”

“ Languid indifference, an indiscriminating spirit of routine, and unblushing dishonesty invariably creep in through the little chinks and crevices of the barrier raised against them, and no method of hermetically sealing these chinks and crevices has yet been invented. ”

“ But his doctrines are paradoxical, and his terms are used ambiguously.
He calls infinite greatness, beyond which there is nothing, the Greater One. He calls infinite smallness, within which there is nothing, the Lesser One. ”

“ And while we have been elaborating and garnishing the frame, we have forgotten, neglected, disfigured the picture. Thus are we loaded with external good, and miserable in spiritual life; we have in abundance that which, if must be, we can go without, and are infinitely poor in the one thing needful. ”

“ The conception of a solitary being, with all the social powers and sympathies of the human mind infinitely enlarged, and yet without any sympathizing mind to match and meet them, involves the highest idea of unfitness and imperfection conceivable. ”

“ In theory you cannot indulge with consistency in an ultimate doubt. You are forced, willingly or not, at a certain point to assume infallibility. For, otherwise, how could you proceed to judge at all? ”

“ But those distributions, from being scanty have become wholly insufficient, and lives that before flickered feebly, have gone out altogether, while others continue a mere struggle for existence, which would be degrading were its object not so sublime. ”

“ Ardent, devoted, disinterested, and fearless of consequences, with no enmity against any one, and no self-object in view, I felt impelled by a necessity that can alone be understood or apprehended by those who, in times of peril, find themselves forced into prominence. ”

“ And this, my brethren, leads me to another view of the vast subject opened to us by the words of the apostle, ‘Every man shall bear his own burden.’ The worldly conditions of life are unequal. Why are they unequal? ”

“ The covetousness or the malignity which saddens me when I ascribe it to society, is my own. ”

“ But the smaller injustice and fault-finding which meet every one more or less in the daily intercourse of life, the overheard remark, the implied censure, too petty, perhaps, to be even spoken of, these daily recurring sources of disquietude and unhappiness are not referred to God's providence, nor considered as a part of his probation and discipline. ”

“ I don’t know a more painful sensation, sir, than that attendant on the discovery of the limit of your powers. Every man not blinded by conceit, who is over thirty, must have felt this. There is a limit to our powers; other men have more—some less, but still it is very painful to feel conscious that the eminence that man has attained to whom you are listening, is beyond you. ”

“ Infinite, indeed, are their attacks, and innumerable the forms that they assume; but of all the shapes of misery, what is to be more dreaded, what is more terrible than thought to a vicious mind? And there he sat in thought, with the morning sunshine streaming around him, calm, and pure, and tranquil. ”

“ This is true of what we call a bizarre mixture of incongruent elements in mode of attire or in manners; for it is experience and the habits of social life which dispose our minds to regard them as foreign one to the other. Much of our mirthful gratification at exhibitions of the incongruous arises through a perception of the intrusion of something foreign into a situation. ”

“ Granted that consistency is a jewel—are there not better things than jewels, especially if it be a man hungers and thirsts? Had they not better—and for the enlarging of their hearts—be mistaken? Yet, I have never heard that one of them ever said, "Am I right, am I wrong?" They persist stubbornly in their opinions. ”