Sanity

“ And yet we resist it every time. That is because we are sane. If we yielded we should be mad; that’s all. That is what sanity means, the power to resist the almost irresistible impulse. Well, I am sane, so far. ”

“ He knew that sanity is in the life of the senses; and that if there are some philosophers who are not mad it is because they live a double life, and have consolations and resources of which their books tell you nothing. ”

“ I It's the bad that's in the best of us
Leaves the saint so like the rest of us:
It's the good in the darkest curst of us
Redeems and saves the worst of us.
II It's the muddle of hope and madness,
It's the tangle of good and badness,
It's the lunacy linked with sanity,
Makes up and mocks Humanity! ”

“ Sanity, which combines with reason and judgment a comprehensive sympathy for every unit of the human race in its struggle upward from the brute period to the highest realisation of intellectual and spiritual worth. ”

“ For to disagree with three-fourths of the British public on all points is one of the first elements of sanity, one of the deepest consolations in all moments of spiritual doubt. ”

“ “Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination? ”

“ Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled. ”

“ Sanity consists in not being subdued by your means. ”

“ All we can say is that the good and the bad, the loving and the malignant, the conscientious and the vicious, the educated and the ignorant, actuated by many motives, urged and pushed by circumstances and conditions—sometimes in the calm of judgment, sometimes in passion's storm and stress, sometimes in whirl and tempest of insanity—raise their hands against themselves and desperately put out the light of life. ”

“ I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. ”

“ For this purpose, striking and perilous situations are devised, or circumstances of strong moral excitement, a troubled conscience, partial gleams of insanity, or bodings of imaginary evil, which haunt the soul, and force it into all the agonies of terror. ”

“ III. Light in the Dream You who have spent your life in bringing truth to illusion, reality to fantasy, have walked the way of dreams. For you have gone from waking to sleeping, and on and on to a yet deeper sleep. Each dream has led to other dreams, and every fantasy that seemed to bring a light into the darkness but made the darkness deeper. Your goal was darkness, in which no ray of light could enter. And you sought a blackness so complete that you could hide from truth forever, in complete insanity. ”

“ Misery, and shame, and horror, and a vain yearning to hide myself from all human eyes, and weep out my life in secret, overcame me. Then, these subsided; and ONE THOUGHT slowly arose in their stead—arose, and cast down before it every obstacle of conscience, every principle of education, every care for the future, every remembrance of the past, every weakening influence of present misery, every repressing tie of family and home, every anxiety for good fame in this life, and every idea of the next that was to come. ”

“ And to all the happiness sought seems to come, and the soul, for a time, is lulled into a sweet security, and an intoxicating forgetfulness of the existence of evil; but the day of disease comes at last, or some great sorrow, temptation, or misfortune breaks suddenly in on the unfortified soul, and the fabric of its fancied happiness is torn to shreds. ”

“ I say universal; yes, my brethren, all changes, all corrupts, in the soul, through a continuance of disorder: the gifts of nature, gentleness, rectitude, humanity, modesty, even the mental talents; the blessings of grace, the feelings of religion, the remorses of conscience, the terrors of faith, and faith itself; the corruption penetrates all, and changes into putrefaction and a spectacle of horror both the gifts of heaven and the blessings of the earth: nothing remains in its original situation: the loveliest features are those which become the most hideous and the most undistinguishable ”

“ So, in a measure, you have found yourself: have retreated behind all that flowing appearance, that busy, unstable consciousness with its moods and obsessions, its feverish alternations of interest and apathy, its conflicts and irrational impulses, which even the psychologists mistake for You. Thanks to this recollective act, you have discovered in your inmost sanctuary a being not wholly practical, who refuses to be satisfied by your busy life of correspondences with the world of normal men, and hungers for communion with a spiritual universe. ”

“ Let us live in corners, and do chores, and suffer, and weep, and drudge, with eyes and hearts that love the Lord. Silence, seclusion, austerity, may pierce deep into the grandeur and secret of our being, and so diving, bring up out of secular darkness, the sublimities of the moral constitution. ”

“ Beware, therefore, beloved of exposing yourself to eternal torments; call to mind the great risk and danger you are to encounter in the future world: address to your soul serious admonitions, before you come to be ashamed and fall into captivity and chastisement: ask your soul, saying, "O rebellious soul, how much misery thou dost undergo for the sake of gaining the world! ”

“ Yet, in all these cases, this feeling will rapidly lead the soul on to become unconsciously weak or feverish, unless the latter manfully escapes from this feeling’s tyranny, and nobly bends under the yoke and cramps itself within the narrow limits of the life-giving concrete act. ”

“ Who can tell the countless temptations to evil which flow in from a neglected, disordered, deranged nervous system,—temptations to anger, to irritability, to selfishness, to every kind of sin of appetite and passion? ”

“ You ought to say “I,” as every one else does; and as for spirits going out of you, or going into a herd of swine, or anything else, that is all a superstition and a fancy. There is nothing to come out of you, there is nothing in you except yourself. All the evil in you is your own, the disease of your own brain, and the violent passions of your own heart. ”

“ If such habits became fixed, through one's own frailty, or the wiles of the devil, or the many impulses that shake the heart like winds, then the soul ought to ascend the seat of its conscience, and reason with itself, and let nothing pass without punishment and chastisement, hatred and distaste for itself. ”

“ And this is why calmness under suffering, in which properly consists dignity, becomes—indirectly, it is true, and by means of reasoning—a representation of the pure intelligence which is in man, and an expression of his moral liberty. But it is not only under suffering, in the restricted sense of the word, in the sense in which it marks only the painful affections, but generally in all the cases in which the appetitive faculty is strongly interested, that mind ought to show its liberty, and that dignity ought to be the dominant expression. ”

“ The will to live, of life conscious and unconscious, the physical instinct, cruel, wasteful, and careless—at times it seemed to her to make of human beings mere foolish puppets, without will or dignity. ”

“ What are we, — Slaves of an awful ignorance? puppets Pulled by a fiend? or gods, without knowing it? Do we shut from ourselves our own salvation, — Or what do we do! I tell you, Dominie, There are times in the lives of us poor devils When heaven and hell get mixed. Though conscience May come like a whisper of Christ to warn us Away from our sins, it is lost or laughed at, — And then we fall. ”

“ I will pray ye to observe how much of our positive misery originates in our idle speculations in matters of faith, and in our blind, our fearful forgetfulness of facts—our cold, heartless, and, I will say, insane indifference to visible causes of tangible evil, and visible sources of tangible happiness. ”

“ You seek rest, but find none. Even in laughter your heart is in heaviness. How long spend ye your labour for that which is not bread, and your strength for that which satisfieth not? You know, your soul is not satisfied. It is still an aking void. Sometimes you find (in spite of your principles) a sense ♦of guilt, an awakened conscience. That grisly phantom, religion, (so you describe her) will now and then haunt you still. Righteousness looking down from heaven, is indeed to us no unpleasing sight. ”

“ How dreadful is the state of those who are daily and hourly in danger of this great wrath and infinite misery! But this is the dismal case of every soul that has not been born again, however moral and strict, sober and religious, they may otherwise be. ”

“ All these conditions of mind are rightly called “evil,” for they are the efforts of the soul to subvert, in its ignorance, the law, an they, therefore, lead to chaos and confusion within, and are sooner or later actualized in the outward circumstances as disease, failure, and misfortune, coupled with grief, pain, and despair. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Even when painful and terrible in their subjects, "they are of power, by raising pity and fear or terror, to purge the mind of suchlike passions,—that is, to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight or, in the words of Charles Lamb, "they dispose the mind to a meditative tenderness." ”

“ As we bend over the sick-bed, all the forces of our nature rush towards the channels of pity, of patience, and of love, and sweep down the miserable choking drift of our quarrels, our debates, our would-be wisdom, and our clamorous selfish desires. ”

“ And think of what I must suffer, knowing as I do that the spirit that animates you—the fervor and devotion, the ‘hunger and thirst after righteousness’—would banish horror from the earth forever, if only it could be guided by intelligence! ”

“ Who utter the deepest complaints against the evils of life? They who are most distinguished by its blessings. Youth and genius are amongst the most clamorous of the complainants. I hope and believe that misery is not so miserable as it appears. I have suffered, and I know the alleviations which attend each species of suffering I have endured ”

“ Those I call Internal which are inflicted on the Soul, while it is yet in the Body; such are Anxiety, Penitence, Fears, and a thousand pangs and stings of Conscience. Those are Posthumous; which are inflicted upon the same Soul, but then when it is freed and separate from the Body. ”

“ Because I know the misery of that face and the evil that has produced it, because I know that misery has been in the world from the beginning and shall endure to the end, and because my heart is sickened at the thought,—that is why I rebel so 82 bitterly against a doctrine that turns away from all spiritual consolation for some vainly builded hope of a socialistic paradise on this earth. ”

“ In books of strict morality and close reasoning, such as I am engaged in—the neglect is inexcusable; and Heaven is witness, how the world has revenged itself upon me for leaving so many openings to equivocal strictures—and for depending so much as I have done, all along, upon the cleanliness of my readers imaginations. ”

“ Must my thoughts dwell night and day on my personal sins and blemishes, because I truly have them?—or may I sink and ignore them in order to be a decent social unit, and not a mass of morbid melancholy and apology? ”

“ Poverty, Sickness, Sorrow, and the experience of Sin are the great instrumentalities for moralising our natures. They are dark gateways through which we pass into a temple of light—into the innermost sanctuary of a truer life. ”

“ On the contrary, the lukewarm and unfaithful soul, allowing himself, against the testimony of his own conscience, a thousand daily transgressions, of which he knows not the wickedness, bears always an uneasy and suspicious conscience; and being no longer sustained by love for his duties, nor the peace and testimony of his conscience, this state of agitation and weariness soon terminates in the miserable peace of sin. ”

“ As the lines of one and the other constituent of this composite picture blend, the momentary feeling of impatience and disgust vanishes in a wave of compassion as the irresistible earnestness and the pitiless logic of those days press, for recognition, and we realize the awful sufferings of many an ignorant or sensitive soul. ”

“ Does this mean that the conscience has become hardened, that evil has ceased to repel us, or that beauty has been accepted calmly as a pleasant and necessary, but somewhat immoral thing? Very far from it. Our conscience has become quieter, not because it has grown more callous, but because it has become more healthily sensitive, more perceptive of many sides, instead of only one side of life. ”

“ The secret struggles of the heart, the temptations overcome, the tears of repentance, which no human eye beholds, must alike be hid from them, as well as the fearful effects upon the peace of mind which these inconsistencies so seriously disturb, or destroy. ”

“ Permit me to exhibit in their genuine deformity the [Pg 298] errors which are seducing you to destruction. State to me with candour the train of sophisms by which the evil spirit has deluded your understanding. Confess the secret motives of your disbelief; suffer me to administer a remedy to your intellectual disease. I fear not the contagion of such revolting sentiments: I fear only lest patience should desert me before you have finished the detail of your presumptuous credulity. ”

“ Pains of conscience follow immediately on a fall, and I see myself in the twilight of a summer evening sitting at a table in my night-dress with a prayer-book before me, stung by conscience and shame, although wholly unacquainted with the nature of sin. ”