Other

“ Each was concerned with the other, but beyond the other each was concerned most of all with the mystery called Life. To live was what they were after, to live strongly and deeply and vividly and hotly, and to do it with the pinched means and narrow opportunities which were all they could command. ”

“ How much we give to other hearts our tone,
And judge of others' feelings by our own! ”

“ Look, as a human being, at other human beings. There they sit or stand or hang. Some chatter, others scowl, fret, fume, complain, brag, grin or otherwise express the strange emotions that move us here. ”

“ The recognition of men, the flashing of high thought to high thought, the claim of brotherhood in the work of the world, and the generous social intercourse that warms the heart—all these were to be his. ”

“ But that which issues from the heart alone,
Will bend tile hearts of others to your own. ”

“ We're all human beings here, one like the other." ”

“ "How much we give to thoughts and things our tone,
And judge of others' feelings by our own!" ”

“ By our common humanity, my brothers and sisters, by our common capacities for pain and pleasure, by our common laughter and our common tears, by our common aspiration to reach something better than ourselves, by our common tendency to believe in something good, and to invest whatever we love or whatever we lose with some qualities that are superior to our own failings and weaknesses as we know them in our own poor hearts—by these, Hear me!—Surely, it is enough to be fellow-creatures. ”

“ We look on all that in ourselves with which we can discover a resemblance in others; and consider those resemblances as the materials of moral knowledge. It is in the differences that it actually consists. ”

“ Sometimes, indeed, the thought would cross the mind of the boy, as he looked on excited faces, and listened to animated conversation on the all-engrossing theme,—“How strange it is that so much more interest is taken in the things of this life than in what regards another! ”

“ You will notice, my friends, that I write one hand that no man in the world can read but myself, and another hand that myself nor any other man can read. Now, gentlemen, I'm going to supply the wants of yourself and family, and all your relatives. ”

“ Yet, there is another, and a better world. ”

“ One after another, he centres himself on ambition, love, duty, friendship, social convention, politics, religion, self-interest in one of its myriad forms; making of each a core round which whole sections of his life are arranged. ”

“ All the pages are instinct with one spirit—our thoughts and our feelings have all followed one another, according to the most approved principles of association—and a fine proportion has been unconsciously preserved. ”

“ I shall perhaps remain obscure unless I say more expressly and literally that the particular thing into which, for the perfect outsider, the occasion most worked was a lively interest—so far as an outsider could feel it—in the whole odd phenomenon and spectacle of a certain usual positive want of convergence, want of communication between what the seat and habit of the classics, the famous frequentation and discipline, do for their victims in one direction and what they do not do for them in another. ”

“ Let us look then at life just as it is. Here we find ourselves involved with one another in the most complex relations—economic, political, social, domestic, and the rest; and about and in these relations centres the interest of our life, whether it be pleasurable or painful, empty or full, or whatever its character. ”

“ Guard the avenues of your soul, your sight and hearing and the other senses, through which contamination from without is always seeking to enter and defile the beauty of God's handiwork. About us is an atmosphere of worldliness, which we imperceptibly breathe in from the words of companions, from the printed page, and the example of the careless. ”

“ Some sympathetic converse with our fellow-creatures: some converse that shall not be mere dead words, but the vehicle of living thoughts and feelings—converse in which the eyes and the face shall speak, and the tones of the voice be full of meaning—converse which shall make us feel no longer alone, but shall draw us closer to another, and double our own emotions by adding another's to them. ”

“ Can we sympathize and work harmoniously together in mind and heart and will and taste? Are we complemental to each other? These are questions of far greater importance than the question of wealth, of beauty, or of rank. ”

“ Whence, then, our feelings, our sensible intuitions, our discursive laws of thought, on all which is founded the external world which we behold, in which we believe that we exert an influence on each other? ”

“ My course of study had led me to believe, that all mental and moral feelings and qualities, whether of a good or of a bad kind, were the results of association; that we love one thing, and hate another, take pleasure in one sort of action or contemplation, and pain in another sort, through the clinging of pleasurable or painful ideas to those things, from the effect of education or of experience. ”

“ in fine, I bid him look into the lives of men, as though into a mirror, and from others to take an example for himself. ”

“ I liked one thing about the same as the other, sitting up there and feeling grand and being down there and looking up at the yaps and feeling grander and more important, too. One thing’s about as good as another, if you take it just right. ”

“ Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. ”

“ All other is merely conventional, and consists of forms and phrases, which are very apt to keep us from the thing itself which they are intended to represent. Give me these frank men and women of the frontier, while my own feelings are yet strong and earnest. ”

“ In the sense of their relation toward other men—you, for example. You've proved that. You're not natural! You don't live, or act, or eat, or play like natural people. All you know about is one tiny niche. ”

“ If each man or woman could understand that every other human life is as full of sorrows, of joys, of base temptations, of heartaches and of remorse as his own, which he thinks so peculiarly isolated from the web of life, how much kinder, how much gentler he would be! ”

“ Wouldst thou know thyself, observe the actions of others.
Wouldst thou other men know, look thou within thine own heart. ”

“ And to be called one thing, is oftentimes to be another. ”

“ They are all right for you, but for nous autres!"-the "others," who neither expect the good things of life nor envy those who have them. The expression implies the belief that the world is divided into two parts-the ones and the other ones. ”

“ The experiences which one person values are thought vicious by another. We must allow, it is true, for widespread confusion between intrinsic and instrumental values, and for the difficulty of identifying experiences. ”

“ “If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others? ”

“ Thy people,... when they have finished reaping one field, they begin to plough another; and, if the day were not enough, I have seen them plough by moonlight. What is their life to ours,—the life that is as naught to them? Blind that they are, they lose it all! But we live in the present. ”

“ They met with cold words, and yet colder looks:
Each was changed in himself, and yet each thought
The other only changed, himself the same. ”

“ And that is what I want you to think about once in a while after you get out into the world and begin to be absorbed in whatever is going to absorb you—the sense of proportion, and the idea of interdependence. Avoid the blind spot. Think of the other fellow's point of view. Don't strain at life, for living and all that the term connotes is, after all, a natural, normal process. ”

“ An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: "There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important." This distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter. ”

“ It has often struck me that the relation of two important members of the social body to one another has never been sufficiently considered, or treated of, so far as I know, either by the philosopher or the poet. ”

“ There seem to be, for the most part, but two kinds of men living in it, living on opposite sides of the same truths glaring at each other. On the one hand the anæmically spiritual, broad, big, pallid men, and on the other the funny, infinitesimal, provincial, matter cornered, matter-of-fact ones. ”

“ As your own practical sympathy with and understanding of other lives, your realisation of them, may be narrowed and stiffened to include no more than the family group, or spread over your fellow-workers, your class, your city, party, country, or religion--even perhaps the whole race--till you feel yourself utterly part of it, moving with it, suffering with it, and partake of its whole conscious life ”

“ But how can He expect that others should 40
Build for him, sow for him, and at his call
Love him, who for himself will take no heed at all? ”

“ Could any other question be asked admitting in its details of such varied answers,—answers various as the means, the character, and situation of different individuals? But there are great wants pertaining to every human being, into which all lesser ones run. ”

“ The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are: knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection. ”

“ By the unity of the beautiful with us we experience with delight that thought and the material world are present for our individuality, that they utter tones and shine forth in it, that both penetrate each other and blend in it and thus become one with it. ”

“ Every man who has lived in the world and mixed with his fellow men will have remarked something which has remained hidden from the eyes of others; ”

“ You may derive thoughts from others; your way of thinking, the mould in which your thoughts are cast, must be your own. ”

“ As you grow ready for it, somewhere or other you will find what is needful for you—in a book, or a friend, or, best of all in your own thoughts—the eternal thought speaking in your thought.” ”