Quiddity

“ But in ages far nearer to ourselves, nay, in our own generation and our own land, are many pariahs, sitting amongst us all, nay, oftentimes sitting (yet not recognized for what they really are) at good men's tables. How general is that sensuous dulness, that deafness of the heart, which the Scriptures attribute to human beings! "Having ears, they hear not; and, seeing, they do not understand." In the very act of facing or touching a dreadful object, they will utterly deny its existence. Men say to me daily, when I ask them, in passing, "Any thing in this morning's paper?" ”

“ This method, which was termed Quietism when once it was reduced to a system, and which, as we shall see presently, is, generally speaking, that of the devout direction, is nothing else than the development of our passiveness, our instinct of indolence; the result of which, in course of time, is the paralysis of our will, the annihilation of the essence of man's constitution. ”

“ I know I began by extending my rage to all secret societies, and then I passed on to swearing at myself for being so rash and foolish as to submit myself to these indignities—I, a free-born Englishman, upon whom, if I had confined myself to the ordinary walk of life, nobody dared lay a hand so grim and preposterous as this was. ”

“ Oh, this is a holy man! he is full of conscience; every day constantly at church, his piety is exemplary. Behold the fate of a hypocrite: this knavery, is it any thing but a dead loss? for of what service is it to bigots to live in such uneasy constraint, if that does not procure them pleasure, property, or the gratification of their vanity?
“And I,” said a woman, “can I be accused of hypocrisy? My virtue, my science, my writings, do they not demonstrate the unfeignedness of my devotion? ”

“ But in consequence of certain false and slanderous reports which have been circulated, justice would require me to say something upon the private life of one whose character has been so shamefully traduced. By some he is said to have been a lazy, idle, vicious, profligate fellow. ”

“ I dismiss the fatalist as a quibbler and play on. Now there is no dispute, unless there be other quibblers. Fixed is the order in which the cards shall fall, eight at a time. There is pure fatalism. But in the movings after each eight are dealt, I shall consciously choose and judge, which is pure free will—or an imitation of it sufficiently colorable to satisfy any, but quibblers. There, for me, is the fatalism of body, the free will of soul. Of these I learn when I play the game. ”

“ Therefore it happened that a man, however heartsick of this tumid, bladdery delusion, although to him it was a balloon, by science punctured, lacerated, collapsing, trailed through ditch and mud under the rough handling and the fearful realities of life, yet he durst not avow his private feelings. That would have been even worse than with us: it would have been to proclaim virtue and vice mere bubbles and chimeras. He who really thinks so even we reasonably suspect of practical indifference unless when we believe him to speak as a misanthrope. ”

“ But that is no more true than the belief about the three women which the Grecian boys and girls held. As a matter of fact, nothing outside of us makes evil things happen to us. We make our own fates. Or shall I say, we are our own fates? Someone has said, "Our fates lie asleep along the roadside until we waken them." That is very true, as I think I can show you by a story.
Not long ago I was riding on a train up through Vermont. A boy came into the car selling papers, books, candy, fruit, and other things. ”

“ He felt the unusual silence and idleness: no mower whetting his scythe, no herdsman whistling in his dog, no straying children: it oppressed him, though it did not cross his imagination that these brooding pauses in ordinary life (so wholesome are stir and labour) have been now and again seized upon for the accomplishment of ghastly visions, the perpetration of horrid crimes. ”

“ This poor wretch is better and worthier than I, and misery is his nurse, and mockery and venomous scorn are the only sounds that hail his wedding. Every delicacy that is placed before me, every draught out of my costly goblets, my lying on soft beds, my wearing gold and rich garments, will be unto me like so many sins, now that I have beheld how the world hunts down many thousand thousand wretches, who are hungering after the dry bread that I throw away, and who never know what a good meal is. ”

“ Whether from a self-inquisitorial habit that he grew into from jealousy of the sins to which men of thought are liable, he has acquired, in disentangling and demonstrating that particular form of moral disease, an acumen which no conscience can resist. ”

“ Now it is certain that the error of Quietism has, in no doubt many cases, not remained confined to such mistakes in psychological analysis and theological doctrine, but that these have joined hands with, and have furnished a defence to, sloth and love of dreamy ease, or to some impatience of the necessary details of life, or to fanatical attachment to some one mood and form of experience ”

“ In order to illustrate the nature of evils of this class, I may take two instances—cruelty and lasciviousness. That these are great intrinsic evils, we may, I think, easily assure ourselves, by imagining the state of a man, whose mind is solely occupied by either of these passions, in their worst form. ”

“ Having become entangled in his web or false doctrines, she is carried away from her home or state of innocence into the gulf of despair, there to live a miserable existence or become a slave to fashion. ”

“ That he still had glimmerings, he had shown this very hour, in wanting to make a gift to his sick little fellow-lodger. His resentment over his dismissal from the Post, too, was an unexpectedly human touch in him. But in the same breath with these things the young man had showed himself at his worst: the glimmerings were so overlaid with an incredible snobbery of the mind, so encrusted with the rankest and grossest egotism, that soon they must flutter and die out, leaving him stone-blind against the sunshine and the morning. No scratch could penetrate that Achilles-armor of self-sufficiency. ”

“ I have heard him feelingly describe the misery, the blank anguish of this memorable night. Sometimes it happens that a man's conscience is wounded; but this very wound is the means, perhaps, by which his feelings are spared for the present: sometimes his feelings are lacerated; but this very laceration makes the ransom for his conscience. Here, on the contrary, his feelings and his happiness were dimmed by the very same cause which offered pain and outrage to his conscience. ”

“ So saying, Mr Quilp put his hat on and took himself off, and Mrs Quilp, who was afflicted beyond measure by the recollection of the part she had just acted, shut herself up in her chamber, and smothering her head in the bed-clothes bemoaned her fault more bitterly than many less tender-hearted persons would have mourned a much greater offence; for, in the majority of cases, conscience is an elastic and very flexible article, which will bear a deal of stretching and adapt itself to a great variety of circumstances. ”

“ If ye are poor, nobody owns ye. If rich, you’ll know nobody. If you die young, ‘What pity it was,’ they’ll say, ‘that he should be cut off thus in his prime.’ If old, ‘He was e’en past his best; there’s no great miss of him.’ If you are religious, and frequent the church and the sacrament, you’re an hypocrite; and without this, you’re an atheist or an heretic. If you are gay and pleasant, you pass presently for a buffoon; and if pensive and reserved, you are taken to be sour and censorious. Courtesy is called colloguing and currying of favour ”

“ Mere human feelings of pity, sympathy with my too visible agitation, superadded to something of perhaps reverence for the blighting misery that was now opening its artillery upon me—for misery has a privilege, and everywhere is felt to be a holy thing—had combined to procure for me some attention and some indulgence hitherto. ”

“ If you cannot keep a secret, and take a chiding, you will quickly be out of my sphere. Corrigible people are to be chid; those who are otherwise, may be very safe from any lectures of mine: I should rather choose to indulge them in their follies, than attempt to set them right. ”

“ Hocus-pocus tricks are called sleight-of-hand; lust, friendship; usury, thrift; cheating is but gallantry; lying wears the name of invention; malice goes for quickness of apprehension; cowardice, meekness of nature; and rashness carries the countenance of valour. In fine, this is all but hypocrisy, and knavery in a disguise, for nothing is called by the right name. ”

“ One circumstance that will surprise you, is, that their multitude is as considerable as that of the amorous; although they have among the former, only the men who were judges: and among the latter, men and women who have loved once at least in their lives.”
“You wish to give me to understand,” said I to him, “that there are many lovers in hell; but can that be? If men were damned for p. 27this passion, no person should be exempt from your infernal jurisdiction. ”

“ Endued with a mind powerful but perverted, a temper careless but impetuous, and feelings kindly but irritable, he, by the early association with depraved companions, rendered himself, by one false step, induced by a too ready compliance, an outcast, excluded from the pale of orderly society, and condemned to herd with the very refuse of mankind. ”

“ Would you, in short, by a rigour so undeserved, force me to believe that I had needed but to deceive you in order to obtain greater indulgence?
I do not repent of a conduct which I owed you, as I owed it to myself; but by what fatality does each praiseworthy action of mine become the signal for a fresh misfortune? ”

“ Issuing from the calm retreats of simplicity and innocence, and fondly hoping to meet with more enlarged perfection in the world, their amiable, just and benevolent dispositions are shocked at the sour severities, the sordid selfishness, the gross injustice, the base artifices, and the inhuman cruelties, which deform the fairest features of social life, and disgrace the best famed fabric of human polity. ”

“ They would excite you to anger and turn you to your old life of profanity and wickedness; if possible, sink you as low as ever. You have but one course to pursue, and that is, to pay no attention to them. ”

“ The person standing a few feet off us, for example, is both stupid and wicked. But be very careful, Quoodle, to remember that any disadvantage under which we place him should be based on the _moral_ and not his _mental_ defects. ”

“ This was the year of Quincy’s warfare—a scant guerilla. And its result? Consider the pre-conceptions of those within the house, and it must be clear that they seized on this new hard Quincy to justify the feelings they had already nurtured for the old. Their attitude, their lack of sympathy, by dint of an incessant effort through the years, had brought about this show of sullen animosity within him. So now they quoted this show of animosity as cause of their longstanding attitude and lack of sympathy. It is a common habit of mankind—an infinitely common. ”

“ And then also you will be found walking abroad in comeliness and at liberty, while others, less careful, are at home mending and washing and ironing because they went without a girdle when you girt up your garments well off the ground. Wherefore always gird well up the loins of your mind.
4. ‘And, fourthly, lose not your robes, lest you walk naked and men see your shame’; that is to say, the supreme shame of your soul. For there is no other shame. There is nothing else in body or soul to be ashamed about. There is a nakedness, indeed, that our children are taught to cover ”

“ Of what value is judgment to a gouty old codger, who sits just as snugly over his fire-side, whether his opinions are erroneous or oracular? who wraps himself just as warmly in flannel, whether the world go ill or go well? and who, if, by ignorance or mismanagement, he be cheated, loses only what he cannot enjoy! ”

“ O Quiteria, why hast thou turned compassionate at a moment when thy compassion will serve as a dagger to rob me of life, for I have not now the strength left either to bear the happiness thou givest me in accepting me as thine, or to suppress the pain that is rapidly drawing the dread shadow of death over my eyes? ”

“ From the low-minded, from the uncultivated, from the unrefined in mind and manner, and such there are in the highest class of society, as well as in the less favoured, he shrank away in secret disgust or weariness. ”

“ Let him who calls me wild beast and basilisk, leave me alone as something noxious and evil; let him who calls me ungrateful, withhold his service; who calls me wayward, seek not my acquaintance; who calls me cruel, pursue me not; for this wild beast, this basilisk, this ungrateful, cruel, wayward being has no kind of desire to seek, serve, know, or follow them. ”

“ She made him read the paper in the morning, and do his writing, seated beside her. He submitted to all her exactions, and these acts of tyranny were like caresses to a wound, for he loved her tenderly. Unconsciously he would feel sudden thrills of happiness. ”

“ A more cruel situation could not be imagined: two persons, who never, perhaps, felt more than that fiction of enmity which belonged to the situation, that is to say, assumed the enmity which society presumes rationally incident to a certain position—assumed it as a point of honour, but did not heartily feel it ”