Living

“ Is sleeping, living? Or absorption in a dull dream of existence, such as the beetle has when it climbs up the blade of grass to reach a dew-drop--is that leading a worthy life? My dear fellow, if you drive necessity out of the world, how unnecessary it would be to live! ”

“ In nature, which to most eyes is but a dull lifeless mass, impelled by dead mechanic movements, their finer spirits were aware of a breathing life, a living Presence, distinct, yet not alien from, their own spirits, and thence they drank life, and strength, and joy. ”

“ Now, it is my living self that I desire to perpetuate beyond the common term of life; it is the present manifestation for which I want to secure longer duration. What! trees live for centuries, and men shall live but for years, while those are passive and we are active; while they are motionless and speechless, and we walk and talk! ”

“ The habits of stars and waters, the huge habits of space and time, are the habits of the men.
83The Infinite, at last, which in days gone by hung over us—the mere hiding place of Death, the awful living-room of God—is the neighborhood of human life. ”

“ Marriage, birth, death, the illusion of desire, the disenchantment of possession; to place one's faith in the external object and to stake one's happiness on the accident of events—did these things constitute living for such as she?
"When you say 'life' do you not mean action?" ”

“ These terms living and alive come forth in their symbolic significance so plainly in the Scripture that there is no mistaking them. Thus the one Lord is there recognized as life itself and consequently the only source of life. ”

“ He who is too busy with the machinery of life to get a chance to look upon life itself, as upon a drama, loses half the joy of living.
To stretch the muscles, to breathe deeply, to feel the blood circulate rapidly, to feel the wind blowing in one’s face, to love and to express love, to stand off and see life from afar—these are joys for which it is worth while to simplify the machinery of life. ”

“ The most practical common sense demands that you feed the inner places of your life, the heart that has gone so long thirsty and longing for love, for things too deep for words, for things that cannot be used and cannot be quoted in dollars. Give your inner life its deep drafts of the infinite life and your outer life shall take its place and do its work in the world. ”

“ But looking deeper into life there comes an awakening to the fact and the significance of the spiritual, the feeling that the reason, the emotions, the joys and pains that have nothing to do with things, the ties that knit one to the infinite, all constitute the permanent elements of life. ”

“ The first cry of life, when he came out of the womb, as much testified of One in whom is life, who is the Source of life, as the look with which he greeted his sisters or his Lord, when he was commanded to come out of the grave. The opening of every sense to take in the sights and sounds of the world around him,—the opening of every affection which apprehended his human relations,—testified of the same living Word. ”

“ But life is worth living, and here we would stay
For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers.
[Pg 81]
BALLADE OF THE BOOKMAN'S PARADISE.
A. Lang. From 'Rhymes à la Mode.' 1885.
There is a Heaven, or here, or there,—
A Heaven there is, for me and you,
Where bargains meet for purses spare,
Like ours, are not so far and few. ”

“ Not a philosophy of life, but a life and a living process." ”

“ Is life—especially human life—worth living? Undoubtedly, since nature has so abundantly provided the means for its perpetuation, and God has given the commandment, "Be fruitful and replenish the earth."
4. The Symbols of Life and Death: "The Tree of Life.—so called from its symbolic character as a sign and seal of immortal life. Its prominent position in the midst of the garden where it must have been an object of daily observation and interest, was admirably fitted to keep them [Adam and Eve] habitually in mind of God and futurity." ”

“ Consider then a living being now existing, and which has existed for any time alive. This living being must have done and suffered and enjoyed, what it has done and suffered and enjoyed formerly, (this living being, I say, and not another) as really as it does and suffers and enjoys, [322] what it does and suffers and enjoys this instant. All these successive actions, enjoyments, and sufferings, are actions, enjoyments, and sufferings, of the same living being. ”

“ At the end of five years a relative on either side left us a graceful reminder. The problem of living became merely one of degree. At the end of this period we had made considerable progress in the building up of a home which should be in fact and desire entirely ours. ”

“ The objects of living are, for the most part, obscure and variable, and prudent livers may well ask why for the obscure and variable objects of life they should lose life itself—"Propter causas vivendi perdere vitam," if we may reverse the old quotation. ”

“ One might as well say to a child, “Now, dear little lad, your life is going to be made up of eating, sleeping, and living. You must get your eating all done up now, these first ten years, and then you can get your sleeping done up, and then you can take a spell at living—or putting things together.” ”

“ I believe in living for this world—that's my doctrine—in living here, now, to-day, to-night—that's my doctrine, to make everybody happy that you can. ”

“ Have you not now made life worth living on these terms? What sort of a thing would life really be, with your qualities ready for a tussle with it, if it only brought fair weather and gave these higher faculties of yours no scope? ”

“ And then, as many passions as the human body suffers, such as joy and sadness, hope and fear, hunger and thirst, heat and cold, drinking and eating, sleeping and waking, health and sickness, living and dying, and all relative qualities are also constituted in duplicity, as creator and creature, parent and son, creating and created, producing and produced, abstract and concrete, etc. ”

“ The life passed in examining what other minds have produced, or living other men's lives by looking at their deeds, or in any way discerning what addresses the bodily eye or the physical ear,—this is often wise and well ”

“ You will notice, of course, that the phrase means a good deal more than we usually mean by living “according to nature.” It does not mean “living simply,” or “living like the natural man.” It means living according to the spirit which makes the world grow and progress. ”

“ There is a great freedom in simplicity of living, and after I began to feel this, I found a harmony in my life between inner and outer well-being. ”

“ This world of things is hungry for the life that is more than things, the life of the spirit; that is why so many love to sing of heaven and dream of a fair world peopled by strange and glorious celestial ones. Heaven is nearer than we think; like the brook by the way, the life of the spirit flows beside this life; happy they who drink of its waters, who already enter into eternity, who find strength for this life's way and work by the contact with the life that is life indeed. ”

“ It does need rest most of the time in this age of pressure, Heaven knows, and comfort and amusement are necessary. But may we not, even while we rest and are comfortable, under the blue sky or on the peaceful river, if you will, lift up our spirits to the mystery of the ages, and reach out once more toward the eternal truths? ”

“ He presented a striking instance how men, for the sake of getting a living, forget to live. ”

“ We must learn to order our lives, not as machines to be driven at the top of their efficiency in the money mill, but as part of the great life of the spiritual world, as inheritors of things divine, sublime, and glorious, as possessors of the joy that made the morning stars sing together and the beauty that paints the evening red. ”

“ This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the natural point of view, and we are determined to make it from that point of view, so far as we have anything to do with it, a success. ”

“ But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams. ”

“ We need to seek out the springs of noble thoughts, to find in the riches of the world's literature, in music, and in beauty of art the food for that inner life in the strength of which, drawing often on its secret resources, we can go many days through the desert of toil. ”

“ Build your life on the belief in goodness, in eternal, infinite goodness as the order of the universe, on the superiority of love to hatred, on the final victory of love and goodness, on the ideal of this great human family of ours that shall come to live in unity and brotherliness, and so fulfill the will of the infinite father of all. ”

“ Here is the religion of the practical mind, to express by the service of heart and brain and hand the belief that he has in the possibilities humanity, the hope that he has of a fairer, sweeter, nobler age than this, to make real the world's best ideals. So, seeking to bring to earth the best that heaven has dreamed, men have found themselves lifted into the light of infinite truth and love. ”

“ Some live in the past, complacently contemplating the glories that once were theirs or their ancestors'; some live in the future, dreaming of felicities yet to be; but they are wise only who live to the full in the present, who catch the richness and beauty, all the wealth that the passing hour or the present opportunity may have. ”

“ You breathe all the time you're asleep, but you aren't living. I mean living—doing the things you want to do: playing outdoors, reading (to myself, of course) , climbing hills, talking to Mr. ”

“ Perhaps those who take an intense interest in living will never be able to regain that delightful condition of equipoise, if it ever existed, which our ancestors both here and across the water are said to have experienced. ”

“ If men might only hear again the call of Him who bade the weary and heavy laden to come; if they might but know that His way of life can give strength, rest, peace, joy, what an enriching life might have. ”

“ The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving. ”

“ THE PURPOSE OF THE COURSE The early question of the old creeds, "What is the chief end of man?" was conceived in a spirit more practical than academic. It was the voice of the constant inquiry as to the purpose of living. ”

“ Surely the best Americanism is the Americanism of the man or woman who makes the most of what this life affords, and throws himself or herself keenly into the thick of it. The art of living is the science of living nobly and well, and how can one live either nobly or well by regarding life on the earth as a mere log-cabin existence? ”

“ If we might but learn this lesson, we people of the laden hand and the empty heart, that since life is more than digestion and man more than beast or machine, since determining all is the spiritual world, they only are wise who set first things first, who use the garnered experience of the past and the opportunities of the present to the enriching of the soul, who listen among all the voices of time for the words that proceed from the lips of Him who inhabiteth eternity. ”

“ As mine were to thee;
The free life of thy living,
Be the gift of it free;
Not as servant to lord, nor as master to slave, shalt thou give thee
to me.
O children of banishment,
Souls overcast,
Were the lights ye see vanish meant
Alway to last,
Ye would know not the sun overshining the shadows and stars overpast.
I that saw where ye trod
The dim paths of the night
Set the shadow call'd God
In your skies to give light;
But the morning of manhood is risen, and the shadowless soul is in
sight. ”

“ What are the best lives, the lives that are richest and that have most enriched the world? Are they those that have given free rein to every fancy, that have nurtured and brought to fruitage every growth of the heart's garden, whether it be thistle, brier, or poison root, or fair, nutritious product? ”

“ And that our whole physical life may lie soaking in a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of Being that we at present have no organ for apprehending, is vividly suggested to us by the analogy of the life of our domestic animals. ”

“ The thought at once presents itself that here is the chance of your lifetime to demonstrate how beautiful and cosy a home may be, and you set eagerly to work to surpass your predecessors of equal means. ”

“ Most of this current educational interest is another stab at the age-long problem of making education synonymous with living. We are rediscovering the fact that we learn only as we desire, as we seek to understand or as we are busy. We are trying to make the school a place [Pg 9] where children cannot escape doing these things. We see now that education has grown up in this country in a separate institutional compartment, jealously apart from the rest of the community life. It has developed its own technique, its own professional spirit. ”

“ Certainly the most recent educational sensation indicates that there are still crowds of professional educators and parents to whom such ideas are not truisms. To see education, not as a preparation for life or as a process segregated from other activities, but as identical with living, takes more imagination than most teachers have yet acquired. ”

“ I am sure that I do not exaggerate when I say that millions of our English-speaking race are living this life without the slightest glimmering of what domestic content might be theirs. Surely the word "home" for the artisan should signify something more than a place where he is badly fed. Still, it is a solemn fact that no more concrete definition of the word has ever been forthcoming. Now, such a state of affairs cannot be excused on the score of expense, for the crowning triumph of good Cookery is its very cheapness. ”