Invisible

“ It is a thought of his, always deeply felt and many times repeated, that this visible world is but the outward shell of an invisible kingdom, a screen which hides from our view things far greater and more wonderful than any which we see, and that the unseen world is close to us and ever ready to break through the shell and manifest itself. ”

“ I was invisible, and I was only just beginning to realise the extraordinary advantage my invisibility gave me. My head was already teeming with plans of all the wild and wonderful things I had now impunity to do." ”

“ The invisible entity within us which says "I am I" can easily be conceived as suddenly awakening out of sleep and discovering, to its astonishment, that its visible body has suffered a bewildering transformation. ”

“ In every homely conversation this ineffable miracle is wrought: out of the unseen where I dwell, I signal by word and gesture to you back in the unseen where you dwell. We are inhabitants now of the intangible and unseen world; we are as invisible as God. ”

“ An invisible something was in the air,—a sense of that vast supernatural which is deeply centered at the core of the natural universe,—a grave mystery which seemed to envelop all visible things with a sudden shadow of premonitory fear. ”

“ Invisible Will wrought clear in sculptured sound,
The thought-begotten daughter of the voice,
Thrilled on their listening sense : "He has no tomb.
He dwells not with you dead, but lives as Law." ”

“ Everything that surrounds us, everything that we see without looking at it, everything that we touch without knowing it, everything that we handle without feeling it, all that we meet without clearly distinguishing it, has a rapid, surprising and inexplicable effect upon us and upon our organs, and through them on our ideas and on our heart itself.
How profound that mystery of the Invisible is! We cannot fathom it with our miserable senses, with our eyes which are unable to perceive what is either too small or too great, too near to, or too far from us ”

“ This unknowable being, this rover of a supernatural race?
Invisible beings exist, then! How is it then that since the beginning of the world they have never manifested themselves in such a manner precisely as they do to me? I have never read anything which resembles what goes on in my house. ”

“ And inside, in the artificial darkness of the parlour, into which only one thin jet of sunlight penetrated, the stranger, hungry we must suppose, and fearful, hidden in his uncomfortable hot wrappings, pored through his dark glasses upon his paper or chinked his dirty little bottles, and occasionally swore savagely at the boys, audible if invisible, outside the windows. ”

“ The shadowy existences of the invisible world become more akin to man; whether it be that there is a real communication, or whether things far off in the unfathomable abyss are mysteriously brought nearer, it seems as if the impalpable creatures inhabiting space come then to contemplate our natures, curious to comprehend the denizens of the earth. ”

“ No more it is, but still less is it mere reasoning.” “If it seems too bold to say that man actually sees the invisible, let us say that he suffers from the invisible, and the invisible is only a special name for the infinite.” ”

“ This latter information I got from the doctor himself, who, along with the rest, was completely and absolutely mystified; as indeed I was myself, for it seemed that there was nothing for it but to accept the fact that some unseen thing - some creature of the invisible world - had actually done a human being nearly to death. ”

“ They were bolting into houses and slamming the doors behind them, with the news. He heard it and made one last desperate spurt. Fear came striding by, rushed ahead of him, and in a moment had seized the town.
"The Invisible Man is coming! The Invisible Man!" ”

“ Heavens! what fools there are in this world, who call themselves wise men! This little poetaster, full of the conceit common to his imitative craft, is ‘inclined to admit’ that there are great possibilities in the study of the invisible! Excellent condescension! How the methods of life have turned topsy-turvy since the ancient days! Then the study of the Invisible was the first key to the study of the Visible,—the things which are seen being considered only as the reflexes of the things which are unseen—the Unseen being accepted as Cause, the Seen as Effect. ”

“ He reached out his hands, but he could not see them. He could feel his hands and arms and body; he stamped his feet on the grass and knew they were there, but in some strange way they had become invisible. ”

“ Precisely the finest and most invisible feelers of our soul run on like roots under the coarse world of sense and are repelled by the most distant agitation. E. g. if the sky is rayless and cloudless toward the east, and toward the west darkened with heavy clouds, I then just in joke turn round and round more than ten times--when I stand facing the east all inner clouds flee away out of my spirit--if I turn toward the west, they hang down again round about it--and in this way by rapid revolutions I compel the most opposite sensations to approach and recede before me. ”

“ So might the Invisible God, she thought to herself, be seen in all things, and yet not be seen, even as one looked into the reflection of the water basin and by this marvelous result behold all mere physical things of the world. ”

“ We find ourselves, motionless or moving, surrounded by earth and air and space. Impressions flow past us and flow through us. We ourselves seem at the same time able to move from point to point in this apparently real universe and able to remain, as invisible observers, outside all the phenomena of time and space. As the ultimate invisible spectator of the whole panorama, or, in the logical phrase, as the "a priori unity of apperception" our consciousness cannot be visualized in any concrete image. ”

“ The motions of the silent, invisible world, where feeling glows and thought flames—that contains all seeds of action—are made known only by sounds and colors, forms, objects, relations, uses and qualities, so that the visible universe is a dictionary, an aggregation of symbols, by which and through which is carried on the invisible commerce of thought. Each object is capable of many meanings, or of being used in many ways to convey ideas or states of feeling or of facts that take place in the world of the brain. ”

“ Scepticism suddenly reared its head,—rather nervous scepticism, not at all assured of its back, but scepticism nevertheless. It is so much easier not to believe in an invisible man; and those who had actually seen him dissolve into air, or felt the strength of his arm, could be counted on the fingers of two hands. ”

“ We have reason even to suppose that no dream of the invisible world has ever been dreamed,—that no hypothesis of the unseen has ever been imagined,—which future science will not prove to have contained some germ of reality. ”

“ So last January, with the beginning of a snowstorm in the air about me—and if it settled on me it would betray me!—weary, cold, painful, inexpressibly wretched, and still but half convinced of my invisible quality, I began this new life to which I am committed. I had no refuge, no appliances, no human being in the world in whom I could confide. ”

“ It 's bad enough to let these floundering yokels explode my little secret, without your cutting off with my books. It 's lucky for some of them they cut and ran when they did! Here am I— No one knew I was invisible! ”

“ Nor were we to imagine less of waking dreams, trances, visions, noises, hints, impulses, and all the waking testimonies of an invisible world, and of the communication that there is between us and them, which commonly entertain us with our open eyes. ”

“ This was the moment when, before the sun, which, like him, was going hence, and before the whole of great nature, which, with invisible hands lifts blind man into vast, pure, unknown regions, I pressed the likeness of his Guido, [52] which I had hitherto withheld from him, to my beloved scholar's heart ”

“ If you look for a minute, not much caring whether you see anything or not, and then turn away, and get your eye dazzled with all those vulgar, crude, high colours round about you here on earth, it is very little that you will see of ‘the things that are not seen.’ Concentrated attention, and a steadfast look, are wanted to make the invisible visible. ”

“ We see but dimly here, for we live in the outward world, and only faint yet truthful images of the inner world are revealed to us. No effort of the mind is so difficult as that of lifting itself above the natural and the visible into the spiritual and invisible—invisible, I mean, to the bodily eyes. ”

“ They have no asceticism, but they are more visionary than any ascetic, and their invisible life is but the life about them made more perfect and more lasting, and the invisible people are their own images in the water. ”

“ Ain't there any stuff to you? Vox et—what is it?—jabber. Is it that?"
"I am just a human being—solid, needing food and drink, needing covering too—But I 'm invisible. You see? Invisible. Simple idea. Invisible." ”

“ For many a day we indulged in the hope that we might yet become possessed of a pot of that miraculous unguent, which, when applied to the eye, has the virtue of disclosing the whole secrets of the Invisible World. ”

“ Now, just at present, though the days are quite warm enough for an invisible man to run about stark, the evenings are chilly. I want clothing—and other accommodation; and I must also have those three books. ”

“ When human sight fails, we continue to explore the region of the invisible. The little that we can see is as nothing compared to the vastness of that which we cannot. Out of the very imperfection of his senses man has built himself a raft of thought by which he makes daring adventures on the great seas of the Unknown. But there are other truths which will remain beyond even the supersensitive methods known to science. ”

“ Every one tumbled on every one else down the steps. For the man who stood there shouting some incoherent explanation, was a solid gesticulating figure up to the coat-collar of him, and then—nothingness, no visible thing at all! ”

“ There’s a roar in our ears and a darkness in our eyes which makes it seem real to us. But before we came into the tunnel we existed for ever in an infinite sunlight, and after we have got through it we shall exist in an infinite sunlight again. ”

“ But since the visible miracle calleth the soul to the light, but the invisible enlighteneth the soul that comes when called, he tells all God’s marvels, who, by believing the visible, passes on to the understanding of the invisible. ”

“ Because the more powerful flood of light will subdue the light of the lantern and the pictures. But although they are invisible to our eyes we cannot deny their existence on the screen. Similarly, the pictures of the events of our previous lives upon the screen of the subliminal self may be invisible to us at present, but they exist there. Why are they invisible to us now? Because the more powerful light of sense-consciousness has subdued them. ”

“ In such sermons as those on the "Intermediate State," the "Invisible World," the "Greatness and Littleness of Human Life," the "Individuality of the Soul," the "Mysteriousness of our Present Being," we may see exemplified the enormous irruption into the world of modern thought of the unknown and the unknowable, as much as in the writers who, with far different objects, set against it the clearness and certainty of what we do know. ”

“ After the lapse of many months I saw it once more, brilliant with fiery beauty—its motion was slow, rotating around some invisible centre. I pondered over it, and seemed to know that the invisible centre was its primordial spiritual state, from which it emerged a little while and into which it then withdrew. Short was its day; its shining faded into a glimmer, and then into darkness in a few months. I learned its time and cycles ”

“ I looked about me at the hillside, with children playing and girls watching them, and tried to think of all the fantastic advantages an invisible man would have in the world. After a time I crawled home, took some food and a strong dose of strychnine, and went to sleep in my clothes on my unmade bed. ”

“ Believe me, Hester, there are few things,—whether in the outward world, or, to a certain depth, in the invisible sphere of thought,—few things hidden from the man who devotes himself earnestly and unreservedly to the solution of a mystery. ”

“ O World Invisible, we view thee, O World intangible, we touch thee, O World unknowable, we know thee, Inapprehensible, we clutch thee! ”

“ For, as to these dangers, we now know, with extraordinary clearness and certainty, how necessary, constant and far-reaching is, on its phenomenal surface, the auto-suggestive, mono-ideistic power and mechanism of the mind; yet how easily, in some states, too much can be made of such vivid apprehensions and quasi-sensible imagings of invisible reality,—things admirable as means, ruinous as ends. ”

“ Whence do these mysterious influences come, which change our happiness into discouragement, and our self-confidence into diffidence? One might almost say that the air, the invisible air, is full of unknowable Forces, whose mysterious presence we have to endure. ”

“ I felt as a seeing man might do, with padded feet and noiseless clothes, in a city of the blind. I experienced a wild impulse to jest, to startle people, to clap men on the back, fling people's hats astray, and generally revel in my extraordinary advantage. ”

“ Again, is there around us an intelligent atmosphere, a sort of spiritual cosmos? or are there invisible beings, who are not human, but so many gnomes, hobgoblins, or imps?—for such an invisible world may exist around us. ”

“ For instance, one might venture to 'see' the Invisible God by a most curious trick of the eye, as by the discovered reflection of one's face when looking into the still, motionless surface of any pond or wash basin of water, which was also, after a fashion, invisible. In the same manner that might one 'see' all things by looking obliquely at their reflection in the still water, so also was the Invisible God both 'seen' in his creation, as by reflection upon water, and yet not seen at all, since water was itself invisible. ”