Spirit of the age

“ Life is complex, and the springs of thought and action are controlled in mysterious ways by forces and impulses which we neither clearly understand nor accurately measure. What is called the spirit of the age, the spirit which, as the Poet says, sits at the roaring loom of time and weaves for God the garment whereby He is made visible to us, exercises a potent influence upon all our thinking and doing. ”

“ Was the divine wisdom, after all, she wondered, not so much the courage which turned the events that came to happiness as the greater power which created light where there was nothing. Only age had learned to do this, she knew, and she was conscious of a quick resentment against fate that only age could put into passion the immortal spirit which youth craved in vain. ”

“ I confess that the experience of age is not a complete compensation for its coldness, but yet its independence of hope and fear, is some atonement for its want of spirit. The finest talents in the meridian of life, too often shine like the sun, upon the just and the unjust. ”

“ I, an old man at the end of my life, I solemnly declare that the spirit of life breathes in us still, and there is still a living strength in the young generation. The enthusiasm of the youth of today is as pure and bright as in our age. ”

“ Our first duty, therefore, seems to be to make allowances for the spirit of the age. But, after we have done so, we begin to have an uncomfortable feeling that our view of the spirit of the age has been constructed from no better grounds than our hero's actions. ”

“ How different was his, from the hoary, but holy age, that ushers an aged, and it may be a worn, but godly and grateful spirit, to an eternity of happiness!—when the records of a good man's life may be traced by the gentle furrows that nature, and not crime, has ploughed upon the brow—the voice, sweet, though feeble, giving a benison to all the living things of this fair earth—the eye, gentle and subdued, sleeping calmly within its socket—the heart, trusting in the present, and hoping in the future ”

“ It seems to me that our great problem, or rather our chief concern, should not be so much how to stay young in the sense of possessing all the attributes of youth, for the passing of the years does bring changes, but how to pass gracefully, and even magnificently, [Pg 41] and with undiminished vigour from youth to middle age, and then how to carry that middle age into approaching old age, with a great deal more of the vigour and the outlook of middle life than we ordinarily do. ”

“ The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal. Upon the other hand, for the visible aspect of an age, for its look, as the phrase goes, we must of course go to the arts of imitation. ”

“ Youth, large, lusty, loving—Youth, full of grace, force, fascination! Do you know that Old Age may come after you, with equal grace, force, fascination? ”

“ The present is an age of talkers, and not of doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and doat on past atchievements. ”

“ On the faces of the aged there are wrinkles made by sympathy; others by strong and pure thought, and others are carved by passion: who cannot distinguish them? With those who have lived righteously, age is calm, peaceful, and softly mellowed, like the setting sun. ”

“ Though perceived as a flash on the surface, this is a pulse of health that, having made youth perfect, can recreate maturity and old age. Everything that exists is holy, or at least demonic, when seen as a new and solitary portent ”

“ Oh! the heart, the heart—what are all its joys of youth, and all its griefs of age? Is it that youth has no apprehensions, and we enjoy its anticipations and its present without alloy? or does its all belong to love and joy when life and the world is new? ”

“ Life's busy day would want its tranquil even,
And man must lose his stepping-stone to heaven.
Thus, every age by God to man assigned,
Declares His power, how good, how wise, how kind!
And thus in manhood, youth, and age, we trace
A sweet proportion, and harmonious grace. ”

“ Meanwhile, he who would dream pleasantly in adult life must see to the material with which he stores his mind in youth; while, in the heyday of manhood, we are heaping together the material of dreams for old age. ”

“ Have you not seen those who, though old in years, were so young in heart, that they seem to have drunk of the Fountain of perpetual Youth,—in whom, though the outward body decayed, the soul was renewed day by day; who kept fresh and pure the noblest and holiest instincts of their childhood, and went on adding to them the experience, the calm, the charity of age? ”

“ What Youth counts wisdom, Age doth bring to trial.
Grave years in Youth, in Age needs no direction.
A humble heart deserves, finds, no denial.
Fairs ring their knells, and yet Fame never dies!
True judgement's from the heart, not from the eyes! ”

“ It was in this mood that he conceived those oft-reiterated regrets for a half-ideal childhood, when the relics of Paradise still clung about the soul—a childhood, as it seemed, full of the fruits of old age, lost for all, in a degree, in the passing away of the youth of the world, lost for each one, over again, in the passing away of actual youth. ”

“ Is it because the earliest impressions, made when the mind is most plastic, are most durable? or because youth is that golden age bounding the confines of memory and floating forever—an alluring mirage as we recede farther from it? ”

“ To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. Youth is wholly experimental. The essence and charm of that unquiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well as ignorance of life. ”

“ Youth with its rainbows, and its loves; mature age with its ambitious projects; old age in the midst of children, death in the natal spot, or the house of the stranger; eternity with its dim and illimitable mysteriousness ”

“ And so I am looking forward to-night to an old age more peaceful, less turbulent, than my youth has been. I reach forward gladly, too, for life holds much that is sweet to old age, which youth can in no wise comprehend. ”

“ In the heart's innermost temple of silence, whither neither friend nor enemy may ever come, there the soul unveils its secret ideal. The pattern there erected at once proclaims what man is and prophesies what he shall be. In old age men think what they are, but in youth, what we think, we come to be. ”

“ The external world is light with warmth and cheer. In the second it is cold and bleak and gloomy, while the ruddy glow comes from within. This growth is typical of the progress of the soul from the pride of youth and inexperience to the joy of the inner spiritual life of old age. ”

“ We have come to that which is the spring of all power, of beauty and virtue, of art and poetry; and who shall tell us according to what law its inspirations and its informations are given or withholden?
I do not wish to be guilty of the narrowness and pedantry of inferring the tendency and genius of the Age from a few and insufficient facts or persons. Every age has a thousand sides and signs and tendencies; and it is only when surveyed from inferior points of view, that great varieties of character appear. Our time too is full of activity and performance. ”

“ Why talk of age, when it's just an appearance, an accident, when we are all young in soul and heart? We don't say, one to another, 'You are freckled in the forehead to-day,' or 'There's a yellow shade in your complexion.' Leave those disagreeable trifles. ”

“ Life has its fixed course, and nature one unvarying way; each age has assigned to it what best suits it, so that the fickleness of boyhood, the sanguine temper of youth, the soberness of riper years, and the maturity of old age, equally have something in harmony with nature, which ought to be made availing in its season. ”

“ At my age,—and there, perhaps, is the surest fruitage of my life,—at my age, I have acquired, I know not what faith in the truth of events, and I have always seen that every being, young and handsome, created about itself events that were young, handsome and happy... ”

“ In the days of thy youth seek to obtain that which shall compensate the losses of thy old age. And if thou understandest that old age is fed with wisdom, so conduct thyself in the days of thy youth that sustenance may not be lacking to thy old age. ”

“ Plain in her youth and middle life, she had now grown into a beautiful old age—beauty of the kind which such years can gain from the impress on the features of the high thoughts and elevated emotions of the past, with patience, lovingness, and serenity in the present. ”

“ I want you to learn from that picture of a calm, bright old age, a lesson or two of what life will certainly do to you, that I may found on these certainties the old, old appeal, 'Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth'.
I. Life will gradually rob you of your interest in all earthly things.
Your time of life is full of ebullient feeling, and sees freshness, glory, and beauty everywhere. Even the least enthusiastic men are enthusiastic in their early days. You have physical strength, the keenness of unpalled senses, the delights of new powers, the blessedness of mere living. ”

“ What is there in a couple of thousand years—the period of thirty-four consecutive human lives of sixty years each to make us speak of youth at the beginning, and "the old age of mankind" at the end of them? ”

“ The ability to hold mentally the picture of youth in all its glory, vivacity and splendor has a powerful influence in restraining the old age processes.
Old age begins in the heart. When the heart grows cold the skin grows old, and the appearances of age impress themselves on the body. The mind becomes blighted, the ideals blurred, and the juices of life congealed. ”

“ These are a type of the world of Age.
Envoy
Struggle and turmoil, revel and brawl—
Youth is the sign of them, one and all.
A smouldering hearth and a silent stage—
These are a type of the world of Age. ”

“ Age envies Youth for its innocence, its vigour and its strength; for its well-nigh unshakable belief in itself, in the reality of happiness and of love: but Age envies it so little—the mere fact of being young. It knows what lies ahead of Youth, and, in that knowledge, there can be no room for envy. ”

“ Truly the tendency of thee and thy utilitarianism, O Age! is to materialise the beginning and end of life—to take from youth its freshness and romance, from old age its geniality and repose; and better so, thou sayest, for thus will its space, its strength, and its energies, be concentrated on the great producing period manhood, and not expended in boyish frolics and follies—in the maunderings and idleness of dotage. Why should there be these waste places in life? “Is not youth the preparation for manhood, and old age its result?” ”

“ How may we give the words a useful setting, as a remembrancer and a call to the young men of to-day?
In the first place, one great constituent of strength which is, or ought to be, the special possession of young life is—Hope. It is a common remark that as we grow older we become chary of convictions, and content ourselves with opinions. I should be sorry to believe it, but I am obliged to admit that age, even with good people, changes to a large extent their centre of gravity from hope to faith. ”

“ It was, however, the first time I had seen with my own eyes this desperate yearning of age for youth, or this something that is almost a death-blow which youth can inflict on age. My father used to say that fundamentally there is no such period as age, that only the outer husk grows old, while the inner self, the vital ego, is young eternally. ”

“ And it was not so much mere picture of youth and age ill-matched, as of youth that yearned with the oldest craving in the world, and of age that had slipped beyond the power of sympathetically divining it. ”

“ Your spirit, your age, your valour encourage me, the necessity moreover which makes even the timid brave. ”

“ Each succeeding generation sees the peaks of humanity from a new point of view which cannot be exactly the same as that of its predecessor. Each age reshapes for itself its conception of art, of poetry, of religion, and of human life which includes them all. ”

“ Thus in form as in substance the poetry of the period voiced the mood, not of carefree youth, nor yet of vehement early manhood, but of still vigorous middle age,—a phase of existence perhaps less ingratiating than others, but one which has its rightful hour in the life of the race as of the individual. ”

“ The events I have just related will, I hope, strengthen the moral so many wish to impress upon the minds of youth, namely—that, without a strict adherence to propriety, there can be no permanent pleasure; and that it is the actions of early life must give to old age either happiness and comfort, or sorrow and remorse. ”