Thing

“ had you in your mind
Such stores as silent thought can bring,
O gentle Reader! you would find
A tale in every thing. ”

“ In the sum of his life he finds this to be the thing, or group of things, manifest to him;—this, the piece of true knowledge, or sight, which his share of sunshine and earth has permitted him to seize. ”

“ Connected with the distinction just made between ‘object’ in the sense of the qualities actually before the mind and ‘object’ in the sense of the whole thing which possesses the qualities actually before the mind, is another distinction of the utmost importance for a correct analysis of the constituents necessary to a valuable whole. ”

“ Once more, if thus, that every living thing May have sensation, needful 'tis to assign Sense also to its elements, what then Of those fixed elements from which mankind Hath been, by their peculiar virtue, formed? ”

“ I want that sort of thing—not ideas, you know, but a way of putting them.” ”

“ Now, besides this beauty or quality producing the emotion of the beautiful, there exist in things a lot of other qualities also producing emotion, each according to its kind; or rather, the beautiful thing may also be qualified in some other way, as the thing which is useful, useless, old, young, common, rare, or whatever you choose. ”

“ And these causes of names are the same with the causes of our conceptions, namely, some power of action, or affection, of the thing conceived, which some call the manner by which any thing works upon our senses, but by most men they are called accidents. ”

“ Invoke the aid of reason, of habit, of the senses, the head, the heart, and explain it if you can. You will find nothing but two bodies, one here, the other there, and between them, what? Air, space, immensity. O blind fools! who fondly imagine yourselves men, and who reason of love! ”

“ But when the mind opens, and reveals the laws which traverse the universe, and make things what they are, then shrinks the great world at once into a mere illustration and fable of this mind. What am I? and What is? asks the human spirit with a curiosity new-kindled, but never to be quenched. ”

“ I examine my own being, and find there a world, but a world rather of imagination and dim desires, than of distinctness and living power. Then everything swims before my senses, and I smile and dream while pursuing my way through the world. ”

“ I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing; the commonest things are a burthen. The prim, obliterated, polite surface of life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic—or mænadic—foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me. ”

“ Is it not indeed plain that, as we ourselves have often heretofore said, when we talk of Being, we are indeed seeking for what, if present, would satisfy or tend to satisfy our conscious needs and meanings? Let us take this very character as the sole basis of our definition of what it is to be. Let us first say that whenever we talk of Being we mean a definitely Possible Fact of experience, viewed just as something possible for us. ”

“ Down below them, is another question which is included in them all and which sooner or later must be faced by each and every one of us: "Why am I here on earth? Has my life any purpose in the great, everlasting scheme of things? What is that purpose?" ”

“ When we talk of seeing a beautiful object, or, more generally, of the cognition or consciousness of a beautiful object, we may mean by these expressions something which forms no part of any valuable whole. ”

“ I saw and heard, and knew at last
The How and Why of all things, past,
And present, and forevermore. ”

“ "It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important. ”

“ Have you suffered, starved, and triumphed grovelled, down, yet grasped at glory,
Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole?
[27] "Done things" just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story,
Seeing through the nice veneer the naked soul?
Have you seen God in His splendours, heard the text that nature renders?
(You'll never hear it in the family pew.)
The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do things—
Then listen to the wild—it's calling you. ”

“ The intellectual Power, through words and things,
Went sounding on, a dim and perilous way! ”

“ Consider a moment in which direction you are to seek the interests of your life. Will you demand that the things about you shall already possess their perfection? 154 Will you ask from life that it be completed, finished, beautiful? ”

“ Why should a man who has seen the inside of matter care about appearances, either in little things or great? Or why argue about the man, or argue about the man’s God, or quibble with words? Perhaps he is matter. ”

“ All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all. ”

“ We should propose to ourselves nobler views, namely, to recreate and exalt the mind with a prospect of the beauty, order, extent, and variety of natural things: hence, by proper inferences, to enlarge our notions of the grandeur, wisdom, and beneficence of the Creator," etc., etc., etc. ”

“ But even among these mere physical elements of the world, when we consider them with reference to living things, we find many arrangements which, on a reflective view, excite our admiration, by the beneficial effect, and seemingly beneficent purpose. ”

“ "And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them ..." ”

“ All the secondary qualities, colours, sounds, tastes, smells, heat, hardness, everything, in short, which is an affection of sense, may be generalized at one sweep into our mere knowledge of things. But the primary qualities, which are usually restricted to extension and figure, and which constitute, it is said, the objective or real essence of things, and which are entirely independent of us, into what shall they be generalized? ”

“ All objects, in a word, that are useful, beautiful or surprising, or are related to such, may, by means of property, give rise to this passion. These agree in giving pleasure, and agree in nothing else. ”

“ The purpose and the essential properties were not somewhere behind the things, they were in them, in everything. ”

“ Here stand my books, line upon line
They reach the roof, and row by row,
They speak of faded tastes of mine,
And things I did, but do not, know:
Old school books, useless long ago,
Old Logics, where the spirit, railed in,
Could scarcely answer “yes” or “no”—
The many things I’ve tried and failed in! ”

“ Everything that was useful in some way or other, everything that was beautiful or awful in nature, or that excited unusual feelings, or suggested new ideas, was estranged from the ordinary and associated with the supernatural. ”

“ By far the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects. ”

“ I believe in the human form; let me find something, some method, by which that form may achieve the utmost beauty. ”

“ To attain The highth and depth of thy eternal ways All human thoughts come short, Supreme of things! ”

“ Suffice it meanwhile that each of us literally chooses, by his ways of attending to things, what sort of a universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit. ”

“ That they are truths—that personal affections and aesthetic enjoyments include all the greatest, and by far the greatest, goods we can imagine, will, I hope, appear more plainly in the course of that analysis of them, to which I shall now proceed. All the things, which I have meant to include under the above descriptions, are highly complex organic unities ”

“ Those things for which we find words, are things wehave already overcome. ”

“ The world is content with setting right the surface of things; ”

“ For these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world; ”

“ All the terms, which we use to express our knowledge, sensations, perceptions, ideas, notions, propositions, judgments, intuitions, conclusions,—or whatever other terms we may employ to express particular varieties of thought, are significant, it may be said, and truly said, of states or affections of the mind, and of nothing more. What I term my perception of the colour, or softness, or shape, or fragrance, or taste of a peach, is a certain state of my own mind, for my mind surely can be conscious only of its own feelings ”

“ In soothing murmurs to complain;
My tongue some secret magic ties,
My murmurs sink in broken sighs!
Condemn'd to nurse eternal care,
And ever drop the silent tear,
Unheard I mourn, unknown I sigh,
Unfriended live, unpitied die! ”

“ Leaving thy fragrance in her tawny bosom.
Thou still dost hold it. Nothing may avail
To rob thee of the odorous memory
Thou sweetly bearest of the cherry-grove,
Where blossoms bloom and lovers tell their love. ”

“ Impelled by a resistless force I still rose, although now against a crushing pressure and an active resistance which seemed to beat me back, and I fought my upward way in an agony which resembled nothing so much as the terrible moment when, from strangling or suffocation, all the forces of life struggle against death, and wrestle madly for another breath. ”

“ There was a general shade in all the lower reaches—a fine clear dusk in garden and grove, a thin suffusion of twilight out of which the greater things, the high tree-tops and pinnacles, the long crests of motionless wood and chimnied roof, rose into golden air. The last calls of birds sounded extraordinarily loud; they were like the timed, serious splashes, in wide, still water, of divers not expecting to rise again. I scarce know what odd consciousness I had of roaming at close of day in the grounds of some castle of enchantment. ”

“ All things have something more than barren use;
There is a scent upon the brier,
A tremulous splendour in the autumn dews,
Cold morns are fringed with fire.
The clodded earth goes up in sweet-breath'd flowers;
In music dies poor human speech,
And into beauty blow those hearts of ours
When Love is born in each.
Daisies are white upon the churchyard sod,
Sweet tears the clouds lean down and give.
The world is very lovely. O my God,
I thank Thee that I live! ”

“ Some come out suddenly from behind nearer rocks or islets, which long concealed the greater things beyond; and some are veiled in clouds which give no hint of what they hide, until a breeze rolls back the curtain; some, and the greatest of them all, are first seen as minute specks upon the horizon, and grow slowly to their final grandeur. ”