Middle

“ We have found a truly Purgational Middle state, with its sense of succession, its mixture of joy and suffering, and its growth and fruitfulness, to be profoundly consonant with all our deepest spiritual experiences and requirements. ”

“ Of course by the middle is not meant a mathematical point of division into equal parts, but a psychological point, which is usually nearer the end, because the impetus of action and purpose carry forward and beyond. ”

“ With a true instinct the Middle Ages first of all looked within this mass of knowledge for guides to its mazes, seeking a plan or scheme by the aid of which universal knowledge might be unravelled, and then reconstructed in forms corresponding to even larger verities. ”

“ Each man is always in the middle of the surface of the earth and under the zenith of his own hemisphere, and over the centre of the earth. ”

“ There is no doubt that those who lived in what are generally called the 'middle' or the 'dark' ages, knew nothing of many things which are familiar to us, and which we deem essential to our comfort, and almost to our existence ”

“ Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. ”

“ There is no way save by entering the mediaeval depths, penetrating to the rationale of the Middle Ages, learning the doctrinale, or emotionale, of the modes in which they still present themselves so persuasively. ”

“ The middle Station of Nature between these two opposite Extremes was the Earth, which was inhabited by Creatures of a middle Kind, neither so Virtuous as the one, nor so Vicious as the other, but partaking of the good and bad Qualities of these two opposite Families. ”

“ For that which is heavy has one place, and that which is middle another, and the light another. To one belongs the superior, to the other the inferior, and to the third the middle. Now in every spherical figure the inferior part is the middle ”

“ Now with much of journeying the people came to grow weary with ever seeking for the Middle all together, along a single way, insomuch that increasingly they murmured whenever they were summoned and must needs be leaving their homes and accustomed ranging-places. ”

“ It will be seen, by a glance at the above table, that the three great divisions of society, namely, High Life, Low Life, and Middle Life, are subdivided, or more properly, sub-classed, into the Superior, Transition, and Metamorphic classes. ”

“ Once, in the middle of the day, in the open country, just as the sun beat most fiercely against the old plated lanterns, a bared hand passed beneath the small blinds of yellow canvas, and threw out some scraps of paper that scattered in the wind, and farther off alighted like white butterflies on a field of red clover all in bloom. ”

“ “Then you are quite behind the age,” said the Water-rat. “Every good story-teller nowadays starts with the end, and then goes on to the beginning, and concludes with the middle. ”

“ Days even in the middle of winter, and sometimes weeks, descend as it were from heaven to fill the soul with delight; and a lovely day in Rome is lovelier than under any other sky on earth. But just when foreigners go away in crowds, the weather is settling into the perfection of spring, and then it is that Rome is most charming. The rains are over, the sun is a daily blessing, all Nature is bursting into leaf and flower, and one may spend days on the Campagna without fear of colds and fever. Stay in Rome during May, if you wish to feel its beauty. ”

“ If it were a real effort to live in the Middle Ages, your life would be one perpetual prevarication. ”

“ Ours is certainly the dullest and most prosaic century possible. Why, even Sleep has played us false, and has closed up the gates of ivory, and opened the gates of horn. The dreams of the great middle classes of this country, as recorded in Mr. ”

“ You're
searching, Joe, For things that don't exist; I mean beginnings.
Ends and beginnings—there are no such things.
There are only middles." ”

“ The mixture of thoroughly modern delight in Nature [8] with ascetic dogma in this letter, gives us a glimpse into the divided feelings of one who stood upon the threshold between two eras, mediæval and modern, into the reaction of the mediæval mind against the budding modern feeling. ”

“ What he writes in his cell will be carried far and wide over distant provinces. Man multiplies the word of Heaven: if I may dare so to speak, the three fingers of his right hand are made to represent the utterances of the Holy Trinity. ”

“ How much wider is the whole circle of heaven than thyself?—Wider than thou canst express.
“Among ourselves also, how vast the difference we may observe in men’s degrees of power! To you and me, and many another like us, many things are impossible which are quite easy to others. ”

“ There is the centrifugal, the irresponsible, the Ionian or Asiatic, tendency; flying from the centre, working with little forethought straight before it in the development of every thought and fancy; throwing itself forth in endless play of undirected imagination; delighting in colour and brightness, moral or physical; in beautiful material, in changeful form everywhere, in poetry, in music, in architecture and its subordinate crafts, in philosophy itself. ”

“ Was the world really flat, and did the sun and moon go round it, as the Church said they did? Might there possibly be other worlds? You can understand, then, that the end of the fifteenth century left men rubbing their eyes, half awake and uneasy, but thinking—thinking hard. ”

“ We are compelled to believe that we act, and that we ought to act, in a certain manner; we are compelled to assume a certain sphere for this action; this sphere is the real, actually present world, such as we find it. ”

“ Centre.—The feeling, “I am the centre of the world,” forcibly comes to us when we are unexpectedly overtaken by disgrace: we then feel as if we were standing dazed in the midst of a surge, and dazzled by the glance of one enormous eye which gazes down upon us from all sides and looks us through and through. ”

“ Outward in every direction reaches the broad earth, a crowded pageantry of color and form and sound and stir. Just at the center, the meeting point of all these energies, stands a man, thinking, feeling, willing. Upon him as a focus converge all rays of influence from the inclosing world. ”

“ On the other hand, those among us who are concerned with sheer beauty of form apart both from exciting subjects and psychological curiosities, hold by the intermediate period—the period extending, let us say, from the beginning of the last five years of the Nineteenth to the end of the first five years of the Twentieth century. ”

“ Where we find ourselves, or where we may choose to put ourselves? You may tell me that public life is, in a sense, your sphere—and so it is, I grant you. But when you entered Mary’s little sphere—as you did, something of the suddenest—had you not then to inquire whether that could be made elastic enough to include your own? ”

“ All eras in a state of decline and dissolution are subjective; on the other hand, all progressive eras have an objective tendency. Our present time is retrograde, for it is subjective; we see this not merely in poetry, but also in painting and much besides. Every healthy effort, on the contrary, is directed from the inward to the outward world, as you will see in all great eras, which have been really in a state of progression, and all of an objective nature.’”—Ibid. ”

“ And thus we may, in imagination, follow step by step the various stages by which the highest phases of civilisation are brought to pass, beginning at the mountains and ending with human beings of the highest type,—the philosopher, artist, poet, or statesman, not omitting the gentler sex, who are often said to rule the world. ”

“ Every place, like a bit of tapestry, has its right side and its wrong side; and both are true and real,—the wrong side with its rags and tags, and seams and knots, and thrums of worsted, and the right side with its pretty picture. ”

“ Side by side, my brother, we have studied modern history, meditating over those great catastrophes which are at once lessons to rulers and a warning to the people. Side by side, we have also thought over and formed a common judgment that every century ought to have, and actually has, its legitimate necessities and natural aspirations. ”

“ A very commonplace scene, indeed. But what scene was ever commonplace in the descending sunlight, when colour has awakened from its noonday sleep, and the long shadows awe us like a disclosed presence? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nothing so starts and prolongs the shock felt by the thinker as those mysterious exfoliations of abstraction into realities in the double region, the one positive, the other infinite, of human thought. A region double, and nevertheless one; the infinite is a precision. The profound word number is at the base of man's thought. ”

“ That the higher circles mingle with the lower, for the purpose of making them wiser, is apparent from the whole body of this work. I consider, therefore, that circles express the degrees of wisdom and bliss which each spirit is qualified, as it is developed, to enjoy, and not as forming a line of separation among the inhabitants of heaven. ”

“ Is it possible to paint more supremely four such different hours and moods of life—dawn, radiant morning,{205} dull twilight, and cold night,—to unite in a higher degree the skill and power of a master? ”

“ Conversation of French circles seems to me like gambols of a thistledown, or the rainbow changes in soap-bubbles. One laughs with tears in one’s eyes. One moment confounded with the absolute childhood of the simplicity, in the next one is a little afraid of the keen edge of the shrewdness. ”

“ We should draw them in from the region of things felt to the region of things understood; in a focus burning with beauty and pure with truth we should bind them, for from the thoughts thus gathered in something accrues to the consciousness; on the morrow a change impalpable but real has taken place in our being, we see beauty and truth through everything. ”

“ There is in it a circumscribed horizon of thoughts which are no further analysed, the horizon of which rests upon the culture it may be of a period, of a nation, or of some scientific circle, and beyond which there is no need to go. ”

“ The most fundamental division which rhetoric considers is the division made by the difference between two intentions men have in writing: instruction and delight—to convey the truth or to create beauty. ”

“ And in favour of the view that some such huge collection of sensibles is the upper side of the half-crown, is the fact that we do seem to have a strong propensity to believe that any particular sensible, which we directly apprehend in looking at the upper side of the half-crown, and of our direct apprehension of which the upper side is the source, is in the place in which the upper side is. ”

“ It is our sphere—beautiful, glorious, almost infinite in its possibilities. We accept the work; we only ask for opportunity to perform it. The sphere has enlarged, that is all. There has been a new revelation. ”

“ Sir, he who sees these states now revolving in harmony around a common center, and expects to see them quit their places and fly off without convulsion, may look the next hour to see the heavenly bodies rush from their spheres, and jostle against each other in the realms of space, without causing the crush of the universe. ”

“ For them the soul is only a succession of fields of consciousness: yet there is found in each field a part, or sub-field, which figures as focal and contains the excitement, and from which, as from a centre, the aim seems to be taken. ”

“ An idea comes to me, or I to it', she says, airily, 'a scene—a situation—a young man, a young woman, and on that mental hint I begin to build', but the question naturally arises, she must make a beginning? ”

“ One world at a time is enough for me!' As to mediumship, or any manifestations of it, I know almost nothing. The few mediums I have met accidentally, have unfortunately failed to impress me favorably. ”