Nonchalance

“ There’s our old quarrel!” he laughed. “We always seem to get into it. But your idea that we’re not creatures of chance—that there’s some unseen power back of everything we call life—that’s too much for me. ”

“ Would I could foresee a term to our misery!—Who but yourself shall find a remedy for our misfortunes? Shall we delay, until time brings to light that which is now a secret, and the affront we have received entail on us a shame more intolerable than death itself? ”

“ The quiet and peaceably-disposed are wearied, worried, tormented, and almost stunned, by the ceaseless jarring produced by the confusion into which bad men have contrived to throw all the elements of social life. ”

“ Thus a disconcerting chance or a temporary obstacle rouses no disposition to measure strength with adversity, or to cope with untoward combinations, but an angry amazement, an indignant displeasure, a sense of trespass upon one’s lawful domain of success and happiness that result in blundering egotistic self-assertion, which often fails in the clearance of the obstruction to the paths of bland and self-satisfied progress. ”

“ For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. ”

“ It might even be said that wherever there is still solemnity, earnestness, mystery, gloomy coloring in the life of men and peoples, there lingers something of the after-effect of the frightful conditions under which promises, pledges, vows were originally everywhere made—the breath of the oldest, deepest, hardest past is upon us and rises in us, when we are "earnest." ”

“ Then when the giant insolence of vice Shall have exhausted Heaven's enduring patience, And the rich waving harvest of misdeeds Stand in full ear, and asks a matchless reaper, Then should you fill the post. ”

“ Not only by the warlike state in which we lived for some years, but also by civil life itself, and the perusal of history and romances, was it made clear to me that there were many cases in which the laws are silent, and give no help to the individual, who must then see how to get out of the difficulty by himself. We had now reached the period when, according to the old routine, we were to learn, besides other things, fencing and riding, that we might guard our skins upon occasion, and present no pedantic appearance on horseback. ”

“ To bear with vexations in business, with disappointments in our expectations, with interruptions of our retirement, with folly, intrusion, disturbance, in short, with whatever opposes our will, and contradicts our humor; this habitual acquiescence appears to be more of the essence of self-denial than any little rigors or inflictions of our own imposing. These constant, inevitable, but inferior evils, properly improved, furnish a good moral discipline, and might well in the days of ignorance have superseded pilgrimage and penance. ”

“ The main question is the danger to our undertaking itself. We had never looked at the other side, from defiant courage, or courageous defiance, call it what you will—carried away by our enthusiasm, we thought little—or not at all—of the temper of the public. ”

“ No, no; it was often owing to a temper, warm, impatient and uncontrouled, which, in almost all cases of momentary embarrassment, chased reason from her office, usurped her place, and decided as chance directed. Let every man examine the grounds of all his serious disappointments in life with candour, and he will find physical causes to which to assign them, without resorting to supernatural. For my part, when I hear a man say that he has been all his life pursued by ill-fortune, I directly conclude, that either he has been a blunderer, or those he dealt with, brutes. ”

“ Too much questioning and too little active responsibility lead, almost as often as too much sensualism does, to the edge of the slope, at the bottom of which lie pessimism and the nightmare or suicidal view of life. ”

“ A wave of shame brought the color into his pale face, and he looked quickly around the group of earnest men to see if any of them had noticed him, but they were intent upon some knotty discussion that seemed to have to be decided at once before they could proceed with the day’s program, and he retired into his own thoughts once more, and tried to plan an escape to be put into effect as soon as he should be freed from the zealous watchfulness of these men who thought he was their new teller. ”

“ For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The by-standers look askance on him in the public street or in the friend's parlor. ”

“ And again, if somebody were to break the chains that bound him down, and wounded himself severely in doing so, some one else would point at him mockingly and cry: “How awkward he is! there is a man who had got accustomed to his chains, and yet he is fool enough to burst them asunder!” ”

“ Idle thoughts, critical thoughts of those about us, silly vain thoughts of self,—how covered with confusion and shame we should be if some by-stander were able to look within and see the busy, thronging procession that streams through our mind unchallenged, nay more, welcomed and indulged. ”

“ Such a self-conquest may reasonably be set off in counterbalance to any kind or degree of self-indulgence. Not to insist that in my case the self-conquest was unquestionable, the self-indulgence open to doubts of casuistry, according as that name shall be extended to acts aiming at the bare relief of pain, or shall be restricted to such as aim at the excitement of positive pleasure. ”

“ By all which considerations it is understood that cowardice and idleness are not blamed, and that courage and patience are not praised, for their own sakes; but that the one line of conduct is rejected as the parent of pain, and the other desired as the author of pleasure. ”

“ We were so apt in this world of struggle and ambition to become centred solely in ourselves, that possibly the wrong done to another,—the wrong that turned our thoughts from ourselves, and kept them bent in agony and despair upon the suffering we had caused another, and knew not how to mitigate—possibly this wrong, nay, certainly this wrong, was good in disguise. ”

“ Is it wonderful to risk that for which we care nothing?
In truth, nothing matters. This dirty little world full of confusion, and the blue rag, stretched overhead for a sky, is so low we could touch it with our hand. ”

“ Through it, no doubt, I was drawn by shadows—attracted by the unexplainable—blown by any wind of irresponsibility. This anarchy at least opened out strange vistas of romance to the imaginative soul. It is odd to live apart from, and independent of, the voice of duty. ”

“ They stalk about in our midst as living reproaches, as warnings to us—as though health, fitness, strength, pride, the sensation of power, were really vicious things in themselves, for which one would have some day to do penance, bitter penance. ”

“ Melancholy, I suppose, is the curse of the thinking classes; but I confess my soul wears a great uneasiness these days! The sudden and amazing turnover in human affairs, dramatic beyond anything in history, already seems to be taken as a matter of course. ”

“ CONSIDER, Christian soul, that so many years ago thou wast not yet come into the world, and that thy being was a mere nothing. The world had lasted near upon six thousand years, with innumerable transactions and revolutions in every nation; and where wast thou all that while? Alas! thou wast ingulphed in the deep abyss of nothing, infinitely beneath the condition of the meanest creature upon the earth ”

“ I believe, as an excellent old aunt of mine used to say, that what is to be will be and what isn’t to be happens sometimes. And it is precisely such unchancy happenings that make the scheme of things go wrong. ”

“ But the introspection, the self-examination, the craving for an inward moral sanction that will satisfy the conscience, and the choice of the particular sanction that does so, are as typical of the modern as they are alien to the classical mind. ”

“ Perhaps, if we are still honest with ourselves, we shall admit that the thing that turned the balance for us was not a very creditable thing—that we were protected from ourselves not by any high virtue, but by something mean, a touch of cowardice, a paltry ambition, a consideration that we should be ashamed to confess. ”

“ With him as with other men, the anxiety of undecided controversy, the trial of the temper, the irritating annoyance of reiterated argument, caused more wear and tear than did labour and responsibility. ”

“ I neither run nor fight, but do meanly stand, answering each heavy blow of a cruel master with doleful wails and piteous cries. I am galled with irons; but even these are more tolerable than the consciousness, the galling consciousness of cowardice and indecision. ”

“ Such men found high and low stations equally unable to satisfy the wishes of a distempered mind, and were unable to shelter themselves in the closest retreat from disappointment, solicitude, and misery. ”

“ You will laugh till probably tears of sorrowing pity fill your eyes at their constant exposition of their own lack of it. They began all things unreasonably—a round of absurdities and impossibilities for the abasement of the defenceless half of human kind, in the unreasonable imagining that they thereby exalted the other half; and to carry out their unreason they made their god unreasonable! ”

“ 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 ”

“ In a foreign climate, being unknown, I might, with some probability of success, endeavor to conceal my unhappy calamity—a calamity calculated, even more than beggary, to estrange the affections of the multitude, and to draw down upon the wretch the well-merited indignation of the virtuous and the happy. ”

“ He passes from specious civility to impatient rage, to the surly clamor of importunity, to bursts of disappointment, to the livid coldness of a mind made up to vengeance, and the scowling insolence of a summons before the courts. ”

“ And now appears the first ray of relief, of recovery, and one of its first effects is that we turn against the preponderance of our pride: we call ourselves foolish and vain, as if we had undergone some unique experience. ”

“ What energies a difficult crisis called forth! How her spirit and self-possession bore up in the midst of danger and insult, and how she contrived to preserve her dignity even while compelled to make the most humiliating concessions! ”

“ Admire the force of innocence, which could even move a heathen, and one of the worst of men, such as Pilate was, and assure thyself, that generally speaking, patience and silence are a thousand times better proofs of thy innocence, than returning injury for injury, and making an opprobrious and clamorous defence. ”

“ Alas! what mischief may be wrought even by the best intentions, when zeal is so wholly unaccompanied by discretion! Should we hope to render a temper fitter for Heaven by exciting its utmost animosity, or secure a reception in the heart for doctrines forced upon the ear? ”

“ Surely, a fearful responsibility rested somewhere,—a stern necessity was laid on some one to cry put against the wickedness. If the strong ones were silent it might be because their experience had not been like her own. ”

“ The displayers of them, in their impatient haste to catch the pennies of the public, or admiration, or whatever they might be desiring, were presenting, raw, confused and unimagined, their own unfelt and uncogitated experience, or, sometimes, an extension of their experience, in which, by an appalling logic, while they limned life as they would like to live it, they were led to the limits of unreason and egoistic folly. ”

“ The low ideals, the open boasting of shame, the matter-of-course conviction that all men and most women were as bad as themselves, filled him with a deep boiling rage, and he would close his book or throw down the paper with which he was trying to while the hour, and fling forth into the cold air for a solitary ride or walk. ”

“ Consider the dreadful danger to which the relapsing sinner is daily exposed, from the sword of the divine justice which hangs over his guilty head, and is daily provoked by his ingratitude and insolence. ”

“ There are certain principles in quarrelling, however, that the true quarreller ever bears in mind, and which, duly observed, do much to facilitate encounters. In the first place, cultivate Distrust. Have always before you that this is a wicked world, full of insidious people, and you never know what villainous encroachments upon you may be hidden under fair-seeming appearances. That is the flavour of it. ”

“ The uncertainty and vanity of human pursuits have for ever been a subject of remark.
And, if we examine the motives of human conduct and see the fallacious objects of human hope, we always perceive the constant attendance of pain, misery, and woe. ”

“ A sorrowful, a discontented, or an angry countenance produces a silent, sympathetic influence, imparting a sombre shade to the mind, while tones of anger or complaint still more effectually jar the spirits. ”